Read the writing on the wall

Terry Mackie

15 March 2025. A Saturday. Some dates just stick. I am still crying into my beer at the worst result I have ever seen at the Principality Stadium. 14-68 is hard to forget: it was a complete rout at the hands of our oldest enemy, England. I have seen 38 such matches, home and away.

Decline is unmistakeable when your team is at 0-17 wins but nobody anticipated this this type of sudden, catastrophic fall. I am still surprised the roof did not collapse. But the writing has been on the wall for a long time.

Why don’t we read it in Wales?

Was it just a match of rugby, or did something else happen that terrible day to Wales? For me, our idea as a nation has been wounded, something beyond two teams of very powerful men in an old oval ball annual match.

That’s why 14-68 is an earworm in my head. I realised on the night of the disaster (I went home straight after, never done that before) that my many English rugby friends too had sensed the extraordinariness: not one text, not a meme, banter-free silence reigned.

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Pity

I wrote to them, half-grateful: “it’s your unvoiced pity that’s killing me.” 14-68: history in its worst making. It is, in fact, the biggest demolition we have suffered at the hands of the English since…1468, when Harlech Castle fell after an 8-year siege at the hands of the Yorkist Edward 1V’s mighty ‘team’.

In the Stadium 80 minutes felt like 8 years of siege. Our guys looked very slow, of thought as well as movement.

Let me spool back one day to Friday 14 March, the road trip on the M4. Why is this main artery into Wales so thrombotic? It has been so for many years. The ‘Slough of Despond’ is no sooner navigated at snail’s pace when another bout of traffic sclerosis is inflicted.

I then stop to recharge my EV at the services, to grab a coffee to improve my mood as well as range anxiety. There are just two charging stations, one is broken and the other is in use.

If you are travelling the other way, to England, there are banks of these available. Why do we put up with this rubbish? I find some fuel eventually in the suburbs of Swindon…the Friday traffic is now coagulating. The Severn bridge (I will never call it anything else) is down to two very sluggish lanes. All progress is low-gear slow.

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Brynglas

An awful word comes into my now boiling head: Brynglas. It sounds like some ancient curse but it’s worse that black Friday. Our government, now dying after 26 years of ill-health, decided a decade or more so ago that ‘public transport’, bikes and the rest would do more good for Welsh wellbeing than a by-pass to solve the permanent angina that is called the Brynglas Tunnels.

The patient called Wales Transport is now in full cardiac arrest. The Welsh railways were so poor the government had to be called in. Cardiff airport is a money pit for the public purse and even the Wright brothers had more flights. No body economic can thrive without ease of transport, freight and human, in the 21st Century. Why do we put up with his rubbish? Infrastructure? The writing has been on the wall for a long time. Have we lost our pride?

I won’t mention 20 mph as much as my family does. No point. It’s too embarrassing. They say that politics departments and business schools around the world use the Wales 20 mph implementation process as a case study in how not to do political and social change.

My brother, tired socialist, grimaces as he tells of his latest speeding fine…he thought the road had changed back to 30 but it was still 20 mph. Are we really that stupid? If so, why?

Surely education is the answer to better solutions, such as organising the WRU and our national sport, linking up parts of our country and its economic infrastructure, so that we can create and retain good jobs and support public services like NHS and schools. Such large-scale problems we agree cannot be fixed even in the medium-term, but, here’s the thing, we have already had 26 years where we are responsible for ‘the big stuff’.

No headway

We make no headway. Instead, we prefer to blame the English a lot, for everything; their rugby has more players and much more money in the game, they have starved us of resources for roads etc, they made us do ‘their national curriculum’, London creams off the best resources and investment and if we don’t get our HS2 share we are going to…kvetch and complain even louder: “it’s not fair!”

I have been in and around education for a very long time and in 2019 my patience first ran out. I wrote a book called ‘The Slow Learning Country’ and the very thought of it appalled all Welsh publishers, as most of them cannot be seen to be falling out with their government.

The front cover of the book showed a school bus struggling uphill in the crawler lane (I don’t think subtle works in Wales). My theme was simple; after 20 years of devolved schools progress was far too slow. Literacy, the capacity to read and write competently, was then at the root of our serious problems of attainment and achievement. Guess what?

It still is, only it’s getting worse as our latest global rankings show. 20% of children are still starting secondary school “functionally illiterate”. 28% of our adults are now estimated functionally illiterate. We used to call these ‘slow learners’ but the truth is it’s bad teaching.

Mural dyslexia has set in. We cannot read the writing on the wall, be it about rugby, jobs, the economy, roads and communications, EV charging and now national pride. In school terms literacy is driving on the hard shoulder, the wrong way. Some good people have recently sounded the alarm about this slow-motion pile-up.

The government has completely failed to explain why it is sticking to its shonky teacher guidance. If you have a strong stomach, look up the ‘multiple injuries’ suffered by our education minister in an October 2024 car-crash interview by ITV’s Rhys Williams, who has been courageously investigating our disaster about reading for the last 12 months. She twists herself into contortions of utter confusion. Excruciating.

Out-of-date methods

Many Welsh teachers are using out-of-date methods of teaching instruction, discredited years ago in successful countries around the world, including England, whose reading outcomes have soared according to the latest PISA rankings.

Their curriculum clearly stipulates that every child must be taught to read by the best methodology of phonics, called Systematic Synthetic Phonics (there are various versions available).

They screen all children to gauge both schools and individual progress and their Inspectorate, Ofsted, acts promptly to monitor how teachers and schools are doing on basic literacy.

Our Inspectorate, Estyn, is in complete denial about reading and rejects any need for screening after Year 1 (aged 6). They say that ‘a balanced approach’ is best and teachers should not be mandated to use a particular methodology.

They have tried to defend the indefensible by citing obscure academic research which values ‘teacher agency’ (pick ‘n mix) above children. They boxed themselves into repeated stupidity on reading when they introduced the hapless Curriculum for Wales in 2021.

Even the Scots, reeling from a decade of their failing literacy standards, are backtracking on reading instruction.

National decline

Saturday 15 March 2025 will be very painful for many years but it did not come out of nowhere. The scores signal national decline, whether it’s 14-68, Pisa rankings or proportions of illiteracy. We are now pitied in the UK, so low have we sunk. One of our best columnists Carolyn Hitt (who knows about Welshness and rugby) was commissioned some time ago to write about the ‘rugby effect’ by our government.

Carolyn wrote “rugby helped create Welsh nationhood.” She is right, as ever, but so is the corollary that nationhood can be adversely affected by rugby. 14-68 was pitiful stuff -we got stuffed like never before in ‘our own house’.

Where do we go from here? Back to denial and laughable defences as per the minister, all ‘pysgod wibli wobli’, and her perverse Inspectors? Or are we finally going to read the writing on the wall correctly and honestly, for the first time in 26 years?

To do so, start at the bottom, teach all our kids how to read by the best method available. Teachers are crying out for specific instruction. Be quick about it, minister, even if it means throwing Estyn under the bus.

Terry Mackie’s 2019 book ‘The Slow Learning Country: Out of the dim into the light’ is available by contacting him at [email protected].