Wales has a school standards crisis. Will plans to fix it actually work?

Wales has a school standards crisis. Will plans to fix it actually work?

As you dip into the valley on the way into Merthyr Tydfil, a new earthy-toned building dominates the view.

Excited staff and 940 pupils moved into the £50m complex at the start of September. But they did so just as the Welsh education system was being painted in a less positive light, with Wales once again ranking the worst of UK nations in global tests.

Welsh parents are currently thinking about the next steps for their children, with application deadlines for secondary school places at the end of this month. That comes at a time when the test results pose difficult questions about why Wales has so clearly underperformed relative to its closest neighbours. And with Wales's devolved government now run by a party other than Labour for the first time ever, can the new Plaid Cymru administration do what it's promised and improve standards?

Sarah Hopkins started teaching in 1998 - a year before the Welsh Assembly, now the Senedd, took over responsibility for education in Wales from Westminster.

The latest challenge has been managing the big move from the old mishmash of 1960s-built classrooms to the vast new building.

Pisa (Programme for International Student Assessment) measures teenagers' skills in reading, maths and science. Sat by a sample of 15-year-olds – 3,406 in Wales in 2025, including some in Sarah Hopkins' school - it provides a snapshot of how education systems are performing.

The OECD, the global economic development body which runs Pisa, says that 20 points equates to roughly a year of learning. That would mean Welsh 15-year-olds are about two years behind England's in reading, science and maths. In reading, they also trail teenagers in Scotland and Northern Ireland by a year.

The tests alone don't capture everything schools do to support pupils, "whether that's a clean jumper, whether that's having a pen and a pencil" says Hopkins. And there are long-standing debates about the methodology of the tests. But nobody in Wales is pretending there's nothing to worry about.

Soon after the devolved administration was established, the Welsh Labour government of the early 2000s used its powers over education and other public services to go off on a different course to Tony Blair's Labour government at Westminster - creating what the then Welsh First Minister Rhodri Morgan called "clear, red water".

Poor Pisa results in 2010 brought about a drastic reappraisal. Plain speaking Education Minister Leighton Andrews called the results a "wake-up call" for a "complacent" system and introduced a new raft of reforms.

Pupils at Saint Carlo Acutis Catholic School are studying in a brand-new building