What is Education? Guest speaker- Ken Jones January 9th

Our guest lecture this week was Professor Ken Jones. Ken spoke about the local authorities in education and issues with their size and capacity. Children Act 2004 states ‘A local education authority (LEA) is a local authority in England and Wales that has responsibility for education within its jurisdiction.’ Ken also spoke of The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).

There are currently twenty two local education authorities in Wales. Prior to the re-organisation in 1999 there were only eight local authorities in Wales. In England, authorities are divided up into district councils which differ from Welsh authorities as they are ‘on a more local level, community and town councils provide services in their immediate areas.’(Welsh government)

Democratic elections are held every four years to decide who has a place in each local authority. Welsh Government states ‘Local authorities have a cabinet-style executive with the dominant political group or coalition making decisions under the scrutiny of the council as a whole.’ Welsh Unitary authorities spend up to seven million year; the majority of it is paid by the Welsh Government with council tax making up the remainder of the bill.

Issues with local authority sustained school is that it can lead to redundancies and closures as unfortunately the numbers of pupils attending local authority sustained schools are decreasing year after year. There are a number of schools in Wales which have fewer than ninety pupils and the smaller the school the more expensive it is to fund every pupil.

In 2006 the PISA results showed that Wales had made a development, however there was much work needed to be done so Wales would be at the same level as other countries that were assessed such as Finland and Taiwan. The PISA results led to the Welsh Government introducing the school effectiveness framework. The framework ‘describes the most important things that we need to do to build on what we are already doing well in Wales. It also shows what each of the partners in our education community in Wales must do to make it work.’(SEF, 2008)

References
Children’s Act 2004
SEF 2008 http://www.sefcymru.org/eng/sef-p2-home/sef-p2-about-sef/sef-p2-about-sef-2/sef-p2-sef-doc.htm. Retrieved April 15th 2012.
Welsh Government http://wales.gov.uk/topics/localgovernment/localauthorities/?lang=en. Retrieved 15th April 2012.