ITV National News have just dropped a hard-hitting report about standards of literacy in Welsh schools. I you haven’t seen it, you can get the text and video here.

We wanted to put together a reaction piece to unpack the issues around phonics and reading (without getting embroiled in any reading wars!), but also zoom out a bit and see whether this first really prominent news investigation into the Welsh education reforms might be pointing to wider questions or concerns with the Curriculum for Wales.

Thanks to Rhys Williams at ITN, Gareth Rein at St Peter’s RC Primary School in Cardiff, Dr Gareth Evans at UWTSD and the various people who gave me background information and understanding, especially about systematic synthetic phonics!

If you were hoping to hear Emma's dulcet tones on this episode, apologies - she was teaching all day and we wanted to turn this episode around in a single day. She'll be back next week!

For today's snippet of student teacher research Tom is joined by Ella Cleary from PGCE Secondary Biology. Ella was interested in how to use assessment for learning strategies to create an equitable biology classroom.

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Recorded in studio B2.15 at Cardiff Metropolitan University's Cyncoed Campus on 29th April 2024

For today's episode, we return to a comment made by Professor David Egan in a previous episode, where he identified community focused schools as important in supporting pupils and their families living in poverty.

To dig a little deeper into what they are and what they do, we've invited Dr Jan Huyton to the studio. Jan has done a lot of work on this, and also uses a multi-agency approach when teaching on the MA in Education here at Cardiff Met.

Jan tells us what community focused schools can be, what they do, and what obstacles we need to overcome to join up various types of organisations which seek to support children and families.

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Recorded in studio B2.15 at Cardiff Metropolitan University's Cyncoed Campus on 24th April 2024