Poor Wales.
When the PISA results came out on Tuesday, they got a bit of a hammering.
Its reading scores were particularly poor, with the mean (466) sitting 10 points below the OECD average (476) and almost 30 points below England (496) and Scotland (493).
But, having dug into it a bit more, things might not quite be as bad as it first seems.
Something that sets Wales apart from the rest of the UK is that a sizeable minority of 15-year-olds take the PISA test in a language other than English. Table 1 – produced using the PISA database – puts this figure at 17% (although the code “Welsh-M,R, English-S” is somewhat ambiguous).
