Guest speakers for 09/01/12 & 16/01/12

09/01/12
Last weeks lecture for 'What is Education', we had a speaker called Ken Jones. He spoke to us about PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), SEF (School Effectiveness Framework) and PLC (Professional Learning Communities). The PISA is compared with equivalents in different countries. He went on to explain about the 2006 and 2010 PISA responses, and improvements that needed to be made here. He also talked about the roles in education as well as the problems with the size and capacity within the local authorities. With the Plc there are three key priorities: namely  to improve literacy, improve numeracy and to reduce the achievement gap to poverty.  This lecture was interesting because I learnt about topics that I did not know about before. 


16/01/12
In this week's session on 'What is education' we had a speaker named Dr Russell Grigg, who came to lecture us. He is the head of the South West Wales Centre of Teacher Education. He came in to talk to us about Estyn. Estyn is the inspectorate for Education and Training in Wales. He went on to explain  his involvement within it, and also what it is that Estyn does. An example of what Estyn does is to provide advice to the Welsh Assembly government on quality and standards in education and training in Wales, and they also promote the spread of good practice in education and training. He also showed us examples of a variety of inspections and reports. Two examples of reports are thematical which covers the whole of Wales, and the other report is annual which covers schools. He had a list of three key questions in his powerpoint and asked us as a class to discuss with a partner which one we thought was most important. The examples were quality, leadership and resource management and provision. I chose provision because I feel that it is important that the children are being looked after and therefore will feel safe to be within the classroom. It is also important that the children are being watched by teachers because that way the teacher can assess where the children are when it comes to developing certain skills. After having this session it made me realize how much goes into inspections when it comes to having an awareness of everything that goes on and how much needs to be taken into account when it comes to making sure that when the schools are being inspected that everything is up to standard and that children are being taught the right way. By doing frequent inspections in schools it will help improve the way that children are being taught as these inspections can pick up on the good and bad things and therefor help improve on the bad things.