Newsopinion
The mind-boggling Airbus order and Educating Cardiff... it's Rhodri Morgan's column
Former First Minister Rhodri Morgan on the made-in-Wales Airbus wings and the much-anticipated Educating Cardiff series
Wings for the first Airbus A350-1000 being assembled in Broughton
Mind boggling isn't the word for it. Indigo Airlines is the Indian equivalent of Easyjet.
This week they announced an order for 250 Airbus aircraft of the A320 neo family worth £17.7bn with the wings all to be made in Wales.
That £17.7bin is at list prices. I imagine you get a pretty big discount when you order 250 aircraft in one go!
Even if you knock off a few billion for discount, it's still hard to get your head round an order of that size.
I don't ever remember anything like it before. It's a huge tribute to the whole Airbus operation and its supply chain that they beat Boeing to get this nice bit of business.
The wings for the thousands of Airbus aircraft flying are all made in Broughton in Flintshire.
It's not just Wales' largest manufacturing complex, it's the UK's as well.
Airbus' Filton complex, north of Bristol just by the M4/M5 interchange, designs the wings and also employs many thousands with hundreds of them living in Monmouthshire.
There are three lessons from all this.
A320neo first flight take-off (Image: Airbus)
One is that the progressive switchover in the UK economy from manufacturing to services is not inevitable.
Airbus has shown just how competitive Wales, the UK and Europe can be in actually producing goods, not just trading in goods.
Back in 1968 three governments, France, Germany and Spain and one UK private company, Hawker-Siddeley, the lucky owners of the Flintshire wing factory, got together to produce a competitive civil aircraft.
On their own they would have been wiped out but the combined team approach gave Europe the industrial equivalent of winning the Ryder Cup! Time and time again! That's the second lesson.
Third, the Airbus complex in North Wales is about six miles from the English border and around 40% of the staff live in England.
This whole idea of the Northern Powerhouse has been under the spotlight this week because of its potential benefits to North Wales.
That's if the Northern Powerhouse ever gets off the ground, that is.
Some think it's just about Northern rail electrification, now deferred but the skills base to help Airbus progress further is just as important.
Related: Welsh Secretary sets out vision for the future for North Wales
I do remember the ebullient Sir Richard Evans, boss of British Aerospace before they made the dreadful mistake of selling up their 20% share of Airbus, that it was the world-leading wing-making skills at the Broughton that made all the difference.
Harry Stonecipher, the head of Boeing had once told him privately: "Dick, I only wish there was some way that you could build the wings for Boeing!"
Politically and industrially completely impossible, of course but very revealing. Boeing actually thought the Airbus plant in Wales was the best in the world at making wings!
That really is something.
Why Educating Cardiff will be must-see TV
I'm looking forward to the Channel 4 Educating Cardiff series starting on Thursday.
I hope it will cast some light on the burning question of the week.
More on this: It's Educating Cardiff in numbers
How do you lift performance in schools as measured by GCSE passes, especially five or more GCEs including Maths and English or Welsh?
In England the answer is very firm. David Cameron celebrated the first hundred days of an all-Tory Government by saying that all schools should or could become academies.
The stars of the show
The Educating Cardiff programme is about a school which has had a turn-round without becoming an academy.
When Joy Ballard was appointed as head of Willows High School in the industrial south eastern corner of Cardiff four years ago, she had a track record of turning problem schools around.
She has now gone to a headship in the Isle of Wight.
Related: Pupils at Educating Cardiff's Willows High School celebrate their GCSE results
In England Willows High School would have been obliged to become an academy. Is a successful turn round of an under-performing school more dependent on the academy name change or is it about appointing a recognised turn-round specialist like Joy Ballard?
That question is more fundamental than the inevitable cross-border comparisons between the GCSE results in Wales, England and Northern Ireland.
Joy Ballard Headteacher of Willows High School
In England since 2010, they have got increasingly concerned about "grade inflation, dumbing down and lack of rigour". In other words GCSEs have become too easy.
Schools, driven on by intense publicity over league tables, have been "gaming the system".
The most obvious tactic league table-conscious schools do is to concentrate on the predicted D grade "probables", to see how many of them can be squeezed up into the C pass grade.
Very laudable in a way but is it gaming the system or is it a true measure of good school performance? If you measured whole school performance, the teachers would spend just as much effort helping predicted C's to get B grades, Bs to get A passes and As to get A* passes.
More: GCSE results day as it happened
That's what I'm hoping to learn from the Educating Cardiff series.
Willows is the only secondary in Cardiff named not after the neighbourhood it serves but after an inventor, the Cardiff born and bred airship pioneer Ernest Willows.
It was probably called Willows as a clear statement of intent that the school should produce not doctors or lawyers but top notch apprenticeship material for Guest Keen and the other industrial employers in the Splott area.
Not that much industry left now and not nearly enough apprenticeships to be had. Schools have to change to fit the changing times.
Willows High School
Educating Cardiff