UNTIL recently, Morriston Comprehensive was one of the worst schools in Wales, which in turn has the worst education system in Britain. Now, though, Martin Franklin, the head teacher, has high hopes for the school. Not only has it swapped its shabby 1970s quarters for a shiny new building, but deeper change is under way. When Mr Franklin joined in 2015 he introduced a hawklike data-based monitoring system. Parents receive a colour-coded memo every two months, showing their child’s progress towards various goals, as well as their attendance. Pupils who do well are rewarded with gift tokens. Exam results are on the up.

The outlook for Welsh education as a whole is, however, less sunny. Many date the country’s difficulties back to changes made after the devolution of some political powers, including control of all education policy bar teachers’ pay, from Westminster to Cardiff in 1999. At the time, Welsh education was set up in a broadly similar way to that in England. But in 2001 a Labour-Liberal Democrat coalition scrapped school league tables (they placed an unnecessary burden on schools, the education minister explained). And in 2004 a Labour government abolished national tests for 11- and 14-year-olds.

Standards duly plummeted. Getting rid of league tables alone cost the average pupil two grades at GCSE, the exams taken at 16, according to research by Simon Burgess of the University of Bristol. Yet it was not until Wales entered the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 2006 that the extent of the decline became clear. The results of Welsh 15-year-olds were similar to those of their peers in Latvia and the Czech Republic, and far below those in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

High rates of poverty are one reason. Household income in Wales is around 15% below the British average. But few disagree that its schools are in serious need of improvement, says Gareth Evans of the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. Much of the past ten years has been spent trying to catch up with the rest of Britain. Changes include moving some training and administrative support from small local authorities to new regional organisations, and channelling more funding and help to the weakest schools, including Morriston. In 2013 new literacy and numeracy tests began. In 2015 a school-categorisation system vaguely akin to league tables was brought back.

Still, few had much hope that enough had changed to improve performance in the latest round of PISA tests, whose results were released last year. Sure enough, Wales was still far behind the rest (see chart). Discussion of poor PISA performance dominated a recent head teachers’ conference, says Mr Franklin. The OECD has warned of “reform fatigue”.

What next? A new Labour-Liberal Democrat government, formed last year, has grand plans. First, it hopes to improve the quality of teaching. A recent report by Estyn, the Welsh schools inspectorate, drily noted that “teaching is one of the weakest aspects of [education] provision.” The government wants trainee teachers to spend more time in the classroom and less in the lecture hall, and will introduce new professional standards that emphasise their duty to keep improving once they gain accreditation. “The biggest learner in the classroom should be the teacher,” chirps Kirsty Williams, the Lib Dem education secretary. Second, a new curriculum will be introduced in 2018. It will seek to break down subject boundaries, free teachers to teach how they see fit and subject schools to lighter monitoring. The approach borrows from Finland, which manages to combine high professional standards with less stringent oversight. Ms Williams also flags the example of Ontario, Canada, which, like Wales, has a bilingual education system, and runs excellent schools. Yet there is another, less promising forerunner. Scotland recently adopted a more open-ended curriculum, with little success. Although it once had one of the best education systems in the world, Scotland’s PISA results have been on a downward trend, which accelerated in the most recent round. Many blame its “Curriculum for Excellence”, which was phased in from 2010, and on which the proposed new Welsh curriculum is based. Despite supposedly having been given more freedom, teachers in Scotland complain that they are overwhelmed by the number of outcomes they must show they are meeting. Even some supporters of the curriculum confess that the attempt to spread the teaching of literacy and numeracy across different subjects has led to too little time being spent on the basics.

Ms Williams argues that Wales already has a strong focus on basic standards, and that it will develop an assessment system that is careful not to overwork teachers. But Scotland provides a lesson worth heeding. Freeing teachers to teach how they like without first having raised standards is a risky approach. That is especially true for a country whose education system is already struggling.