By Fin Wilson
This week, I watched Estyn’s strategic leadership team give evidence to the Children, Young People and Education (CYPE) scrutiny committee in the Senedd. Their evidence was revealing.
Estyn’s role in education and whether the inspectorate is value for money is something I have been thinking about for some time. I want to set out some key evidence that Estyn gave the CYPE committee today and explain what this shows about what it is able to do and what it should not be attempting.
Estyn is finally focusing on reading – but why now?
Estyn recently announced (2025) a three-year in-depth focus on reading, so it is not surprising that how well schools are supporting the basics, including reading, was the first question it was asked. Chief Inspector Owen Evans’s response when asked why Estyn was carrying this analysis out and why now was: “For the first time for a long time, this year we’ve announced that we’re going to have a specific focus as part of our entire work around reading, because we think it’s got to the point where we probably need to prioritise some of the basic skills.”
So, in other words, Estyn has only just noticed that standards of reading are bad, and bad enough for them to do something about it. Why didn’t it notice before? Why have the standards of reading become so dire that the inspectorate needs to have a focus for all its work over three years that focuses specifically on raising the standards of reading? Or is it simply that Estyn’s hand has been forced and it has to be seen to be doing something?
Standards of reading in Wales have been poor, the worst of all four home nations since October 2022 when the PISA tests were carried out. The in-depth work from Estyn won’t start until September 2026. That’s four years later. So, the question is, did Estyn only notice the problem after the PISA results were published in December 2023, or did it only notice in September 2024 when ITN first started reporting that schools in Wales were using cueing, a discredited method of teaching early reading? Why didn’t it recognise that the children who were 15 in autumn 2022 hadn’t learnt to read effectively when they were learning to read in primary school in 2012-13? Coincidentally, that was the first year schools in Wales would have been teaching children to read using the Literacy Framework.
Estyn has consistently stated that it believes the teaching of early reading, or decoding, is going well. It thinks it is “reading for meaning” where pupils’ skills aren’t what they should be.
How does Estyn know this? What evidence does it have that teachers across Wales are teaching pupils to read well, early? There is none. That’s right, there is no national data that measures whether children are able to read at the expected level by age six.
So, Estyn also does not have any clear data to say whether it is lower-than-expected standards of decoding that is leading to later problems for children in reading for meaning. In one primary school’s data I have seen, in 2023/4 it had 63% of pupils with a reading age more than 6 months below their chronological age, levelling slightly to 52% in 2024/5, but still the majority. And yet, it received a glowing endorsement from Estyn when it was inspected in 2025. No mention of the fact that the majority of its pupils were not learning to read effectively. So, when it comes to identifying whether schools have a problem with teaching pupils to read well in the early years, Estyn doesn’t seem to know what it is talking about.
Does Estyn actually know how to raise standards in schools?
When Chief Inspector Owen Evans was asked in the committee hearing what Wales could learn from the best education systems about how to raise standards, his answer was that the best systems had “very clearly defined progression steps with age related expectations,” and “quite sophisticated assessment methods”.
However, when his colleague Claire Morgan was asked what she thought the best schools were doing to raise standards of maths and numeracy for pupils, she said: “Where children make progress in mathematics it is always underpinned by high quality teaching.”
To be fair to Owen Evans, his question was more general, but it is significant that it wasn’t better quality teaching that he identified that these education systems were doing better, but how they measured standards. Any teacher will tell you that knowing the standard your pupils should be reaching at a particular age, or having a suitable test that does that job is useful, but knowing how to teach well in the first place is far more important. The quality of teaching, research tells us (Allen et al, 2016), is the single most important lever in closing the disadvantage gap.
This is the crux of the problem for Estyn. It simply does not have the information it needs to properly hold schools to account or support them to improve, and that is not wholly its fault. Owen Evans stated that there needs to be “clearer benchmarking that teachers can understand and implement”. Claire Morgan went on to say that Estyn is “very supportive of the need for minimum age-related expectations at each progression step”. However, when individual schools do have data that could highlight whether teaching is working, inspectors should use it to make their evaluation.
The removal of standards from the Curriculum for Wales framework has had catastrophic results for pupils. The statements of learning, which are narrative descriptors, are open to widely different interpretations. The national personalised assessments for reading, numeracy and numerical reasoning only measure progress rather than standards and so the inspectorate simply has no idea what the state of reading is for primary age pupils. It is defaulting to what it can see in its inspections, which is that children are being taught to decode, but by the time they get to year 6 and 7, they cannot read well enough to understand what they have read. Yet this is not the rigorous and expert analysis that it purports to be.
In the second part of this blog, I’ll look at the international evidence Estyn is using, and why it is making the wrong comparisons