SPECIAL REPORT: Wales's PISA results - where do we go from here?

We interrupt your Friday off from our podcast to bring you a special episode about Wales’s PISA results! There’s been plenty of commentary about this already, and we wanted to contribute something that chews over the implications. Despite the results landing very inconveniently in the middle of our busiest teaching period of the year, we found a slot when we could both get in front of a microphone, and we’re doing our best to try and work out where we go from here without sugar coating the fact that these PISA results are really, really not good.  For those listeners new to these things, we take a brief run around what PISA actually is, then dive into Wales’s results, get a flavour of the commentary, and try to get a sense of where your new Plaid Cymru overlords want to take things next. Were they lucky to get this bombshell early in their tenure? Or are they already too late to avoid another bad news bomb in three years’ time?  Tom’s been sniffing around to get a sense of what’s going on behind closed doors in Welsh Government, and has a few things to report about some speedy announcements, and a curriculum review by the end of the year.  Thanks to Rhys Williams from ITV News for the clip that opens this episode. You can follow Rhys on X (and we recommend that you do!) at @rhyswilliamstv - his digging around the detail of data and inspection reports is doing a fine service to education journalism in Wales.  We’ll be revisiting plenty of the themes covered today over the course of the year. Normal service will be resumed next week! —————————— Recorded in studio B2.15 at Cardiff Metropolitan University’s Cyncoed Campus on 10th September 2026