I wonder if this is a great as Eryl Crump of the Daily Post (whoever he/she is and whatever that is) thinks it is:

A NEW and unique Welsh qualification is exciting educationalists and business leaders, Education Minister Jane Davidson claimed yesterday.

The Assembly's education supremo said the new Welsh Baccalaureate had been approved by university authorities and gained the support of the CBI.

She told the Daily Post: "The Welsh Bac is innovative. It's a new qualification developed by the Welsh Joint Education Committee and the Welsh Assembly Government. The Welsh Bac is distinctive, modern and proudly Welsh."

It feels like someone believes in it. On the other hand, Jane Davidson is a politician and it could all be hype and nonsense.

Read on, and the central idea simply seems to be that children need to be eased into productive work and prepared for productive work, rather than just taught nothing about productive work for a decade and then chucked into the dole queues, where they have to work it all out for themselves. Reading between the lines, as you generally have to do with newspaper education stories, it would appear that the children pick up marks for things like getting to work on time and being polite instead of neanderthal, having had a wash beforehand, and for being able to cooperate.

That last point is interesting. The traditional school doesn't really teach cooperation. It teachers individual intellectual skill. It trains individual minds.

But, on the other hand, maybe what employers want is precisely that: trained minds. They can teach all that stuff about punctuality, politeness, washing, etc., but only if it's worth it – if the person they are teaching the basic boring stuff to is worth bothering with. After all, if someone is smart, and can read, write and add up, it isn't hard for him to realise the importance of such stuff. All he has to do is something he may not have been doing at his school, which is look at the world through the eyes of those around him, rather than just through his own eyes.

Even so, I found the report interesting. Is devolution starting to work, I wonder? Even if it only unleashes a little healthy competition with English education, it might do some real good.