Montgomeryshire Assembly Member, Russell George, said that one of his key priorities for 2014 will be to increase pressure on the Welsh Government to raise education standards in Wales.
Mr George made the commitment following the acknowledgment made over the Christmas period by the Education Minister, Huw Lewis AM, that the Welsh Government had been complacent and that it had to apologise to Wales’ young people for failing school standards.
The Government’s education credibility was left in tatters a few weeks ago when the latest international PISA test results showed that Wales had fallen further behind the rest of the UK in key subjects. The results showed that Wales just scraped into the top 40 OECD countries across the relevant subject areas, which is far away from the Welsh Government’s target of raising Wales’ ranking to the top 20 by 2015.
Commenting, Mr George said:
“The Welsh Government has been failing Wales’ young people for many years now and the recent PISA results just go to prove how complacent Ministers have been.
“It was only in October that the First Minister promised improvements in Wales’ PISA rankings; clearly his credibility and that of his government now lies in tatters.
“PISA is a robust and authoritative indicator of global educational standards, so these truly appalling figures show Wales’ educational performance has at best, stagnated and at worst, declined.
“The alarm bells were ringing in 2009 when the last set of published PISA results showed that Welsh students were drifting further behind the rest of the UK; yet it seems in educational terms, Welsh Ministers have wasted the past three years.
“One Party has been running the education system in Wales now for the past 14 years. A whole generation of young people have been though Labour’s unfit for purpose school system, which is failing to equip them for the global race.
“If young people in Wales are not sufficiently literate or numerate, they will lose out to other countries in the global jobs market and our economy will ultimately suffer.
“Education is a key route out of poverty but globalisation disadvantages the ill-educated most and these results risk condemning Wales to another decade as the poorest part of the UK.
“The Minister was right to apologise and take responsibility but that’s not going to change things around – now it’s time for action.
“Mr Lewis now needs to step up to the plate and address the woeful systemic failure on this Government’s watch and I will be doing everything I can to ensure he does this.”
