Month: October 2021

A defining moment for Curriculum for Wales – why we must act now to bridge the old world with the new

It’s been three years this month since I started this blog.

I did so for two reasons: I’ve always found writing in this style cathartic and thought it a good way of getting certain, niggly things of my chest.

Second, I saw it as a way of giving those I work with more of a voice; I’ve always been very aware of the privileged position people in academia have to speak truth to power and say things others perhaps can’t.

It’s something I’ve sought to do, fairly and honestly, throughout my professional career; and it is something, in the absence of a thriving Welsh media that, in my view, Wales desperately needs.

But I’ve never criticised for the sake of being critical and, instead, these blogs have sought to be both constructive and challenging in equal measure.

And it is in that spirit of openness that I say this – I have never, since starting out on this evening pursuit, been more concerned than I am now about our fast-approaching Curriculum for Wales (CfW).

Admittedly, I can imagine that statement coming across a little alarmist – it’s genuinely not intended to be.

Rather it is, I believe, a true reflection on where we are in our journey of education reform.

Principally, I say I’m concerned – more so now than when I started – because many of the things I’ve been writing about since October 2018 remain unanswered, and are as a big a problem today as they were then.

The big difference, of course, is that CfW is getting ever closer; time is running out and we have less than 11 months – or just two and a half terms – to ready ourselves for the biggest change in education for a generation.

Yet here we are, and here I am, entertaining the same old arguments. Namely, that:

Now I’m not going to dwell too much on the issues of subsidiarity and qualifications (given we’ve been there so many times before), other than to say that schools need to know the parameters in which they are working.

The teachers I speak to – and I speak to a lot – are very conscious of their huge responsibility to choose rich and varied content that will meet the requirements of the new curriculum framework. It’s a heavy weight to shoulder.

What is far less clear is the extent to which they are allowed to diverge from colleagues in other settings, and how what they offer feeds into qualifications and what comes next.

Or to put it another way, what level of variation across our school settings is acceptable as we segue into CfW?

Foundational skills

It looks like those of us pushing for a ‘common core’ or list of non-negotiables that would see every school in every part of Wales teach the same things have lost that particular argument.

I still think we’ll get there in the end, but not before thousands of pupils have missed out on the so-called ‘powerful knowledge’ some schools will be teaching and others won’t.

But assuming an agreed level of prescription does fail to materialise, at least in the short to medium-term, then supporting the profession to craft their own curriculum offers becomes all the more important.

Indeed, ensuring that all teachers and leaders have the right foundational skills to go about designing their curricula, should surely be one of our foremost priorities.

Now there are two ways of looking at this.

On the one hand, there are those who reason that an overly prescriptive and consistent professional learning offer will go against everything the curriculum stands for – and end up clawing back agency from the very people our curriculum seeks to empower.

Conversely, many believe that leaving teachers to ‘do their own thing’ and grapple with curriculum design unaided leaves too much to chance.

I’ve come to the conclusion, based on a number of discussions with teachers and leaders over many months, that we need something in between; a halfway house that respects both viewpoints, and their inherent strengths and weaknesses.

Put simply, we need to find a way of bridging the old world with the new.

The diagram below offers a crude – and doubtless over-simplified – visualisation of where I think many in our profession currently sit.

First thing’s first – apologies for the abject design and botched artwork. There’s a good reason I’ve spent the last 15 years writing.

But what I hope to have encapsulated is the gaping chasm that exists between old ways of working and new.

We’re going in Wales from a curriculum that was nationally-imposed and fixed, to one that is flexible and constructed locally.

A curriculum that was prescribed within a culture of performativity, to a curriculum offering autonomy and a renewed sense of professionalism.

From passive, to proactive; from de-skilled, to highly-skilled – the dichotomies have been well-versed.

The reality, however, is that too many of our school staff find themselves stuck between two worlds.

True, a good number are climbing up the other side of the mountain and emerging from the well of their own volition. These, in my experience, tend to be those closest to the curriculum design process; teachers and leaders who’ve ‘pioneered’ and benefitted most from their school’s first-hand involvement in early conceptualisation.

But for some, the safety of prescription and ‘what we have always done’ is too big a draw, least not because of the long shadow of a data-driven performativity culture and, let’s face it, mistrust in a more punitive school accountability system.

And therein lies the challenge: of conditioning oneself for the new world whilst at the same time erasing from memory what has happened for much of the last 30 years.

My point is this – we cannot expect teachers at all stages of their professional careers to jump seamlessly from one way of working to the next, unaided.

They must be supported in making that passage through, which requires careful transition from old to new.

Failure to do so risks leaving hundreds, if not thousands, of school staff (and their pupils) languishing in the void.

Muddled, confused and chaotic

A possible way through the malaise is the design and roll-out of a genuinely national programme of professional learning.

Not the abstract wish list described in the fanciful ‘National Approach to Professional Learning’; nor the curious mix of advice and guidance listed under the Welsh Government’s oddly-named ‘Professional Development’ website.

But a tangible, evidence-based resource for all teachers in all settings; a mandatory module and/or starter kit for schools to share with their staff at the earliest convenience.

An ‘introduction to curriculum design’, co-constructed with all key stakeholders (a pre-requisite of all such resources), wouldn’t be a bad place to begin. Then again, we might just start by asking teachers what they need – and what they’re not getting at the moment.

The results of the Welsh Government’s own survey of senior leaders gives a pretty good steer on our current predicament; of the 345 who participated, two-thirds of senior leaders (67%) thought their school needed additional support to prepare for curriculum roll-out when asked in the summer.

A further 54% disagreed that sufficient time had been made available within the school calendar to prepare for it.

Now I’m not for a minute suggesting that our response to this very noticeable lacuna is to hold teachers by the hand and walk them across the metaphorical bridge one by one (in the prescriptive mould of the old world).

More that we light it, pave it and strengthen our scaffold around it, so as to reassure teachers that they are working on solid ground.

This requires a coherence in our professional learning offer, and a promise that wherever you are in Wales, you will be shown the right path.

Graham Donaldson rightly warned in Successful Futures that if his ‘radical and wide-ranging’ proposals were to be successful, ‘there needs to be an extensive, well-coordinated and sustained professional learning programme that involves all leaders, teachers and other practitioners’.

For me, the key word in that statement is programme – singular, not plural.

At the moment, there’s so much being offered, from so many different sources, that it’s difficult to see the wood for the trees.

The professional learning scene is muddled and confused, bordering on chaotic, and without any attempt to rein it back, quality assurance is nigh on impossible.

In short, teachers need confidence that what they choose to do is high-quality, effective and has impact; they need to know what they can trust.

That is precisely why teachers need an entitlement to professional learning – in whatever shape and form we consider best – that is universally available.

This starts by deciding, to use CfW parlance, ‘What Matters’ for professional learning.

‘Teachers need to work it out themselves’

Asking teachers to conceptualise, design and implement their own curriculum without support is like giving them a flat pack without instructions.

They’re familiar with the parts, and have a reasonable understanding of what goes where based on past experience, but they won’t necessarily know what to look out for and avoid.

Granted, all furniture is different, and we must consider carefully what is applicable to all and what isn’t.

But we must be equally mindful that if you don’t fit the parts together properly, your new wardrobe (no guesses what I was doing on the weekend) will end up wonky – or worse, fall down altogether.

Now I know full well what some will say – ‘teachers need to work it out for themselves’.

We’ve all heard it so many times before.

But in the midst of a pandemic, and against a backdrop of shrinking school budgets, exactly when are teachers supposed to find the time for such ‘heavy lifting’ (a phrase I loathe, but feels appropriate here)?

In an ideal world, every teacher and leader in Wales would be afforded weeks of non-contact time to reflect, remodel and remake what they do in the classroom.

But an ideal world this is not and in the absence of one of those ‘magic money trees’, we can only be pragmatic.

I spent some time recently looking back over the accreditation criteria teacher education providers in Wales were required to address as part of the Welsh Government’s wholesale reform of teacher education in readiness for the new curriculum.

In her foreword to the document, published in 2018, the then Education Minister Kirsty Williams declared the following:

‘This reconceptualised accreditation criteria along with new professional standards for teaching and leadership, which set out rigorous expectations for entry to the profession, provide the cornerstone of a new teacher professionalism not only for initial teacher education but for career-long professional learning.’

Rigorous expectations, the cornerstone of professionalism and the promise of career-long professional learning.

The document itself lists, ‘inter alia’, a whole raft of things to which student-teachers should be given introduction as a matter of course.

Some are deliberately high-level and open to local interpretation (e.g. ‘the role of assessment in teaching and learning’), whereas others are more specific (e.g. ‘the Welsh Government’s newly developed ALN Transformation Programme’).

‘This Accreditation Criteria,’ according to Ms Williams ‘…makes clear our expectations – our requirements – for fundamental change.’

There is not in my view, over and above a very basic and shared understanding of the importance of professional learning, a cogent articulation of the expectations and/or requirements to satisfy fundamental change in this context.

There is a clear blueprint for transformation of the way we support new and novice teachers; but no such plan for more established, practising teachers.

Turning vision into reality

I’ve been fortunate enough to sit in on a good number of curriculum webinars and workshops in recent months, with academics and professionals from across the world.

What’s reassuring is that these same challenges come up time and again – they are absolutely not unique to Wales and our situation is not radically different to what others have faced and are still working through now. International research says the same.

In essence, none of this is easy – tough decisions have to be made and, as with so much in education, there are trade-offs. The perfect answer to these problems – of variation vs consistency; of prescription vs autonomy – doesn’t exist.

And so it follows that we should not dismiss out of hand any attempt at tackling these big issues, provided they are workable, judicious and developed firmly with the profession in mind.

To date, the best ‘Welsh’ stab at squaring these circles I’ve seen (apologies if I’ve missed yours) has come from the Central South Consortium, which has launched its own ‘one-stop shop’ on CfW.

Complete with a simple design thinking model which guides users through the various phases of curriculum realisation, the website is more practical and far more coherent than others I’ve come across, and policymakers would do worse than to reflect on how it manages to convey some of the big ideas of curriculum design in an accessible and infinitely transferable way.

The Welsh Government’s recent ‘Journey to curriculum roll-out’ document, whilst undoubtedly well-intentioned, didn’t quite hit the mark.

Its purpose, we are told at the beginning, ‘is to support schools with a common set of expectations, priorities and supporting information for curriculum design’.

But when you get down to the nitty gritty, it only really serves to muddy and confuse matters further.

Hands up, I quite like the starter questions and the ‘iterative process of curriculum design’ has potential – but these won’t by themselves turn vision into reality.

For me, the document spends too much time going over old ground and regurgitates much of what has already been written.

Nebulous and potentially problematic terms (see e.g. reference to ‘high level’/ ‘continuous improvement’) are used interchangeably, leaving far too much open to interpretation.

Elsewhere, schools are told that they ‘should not feel rushed into taking shortcuts in the design process’ a mere three sentences after they’re reminded that ‘the overall timeline for reform has not changed’.

Document overload

Overall, the Journey to curriculum roll-out reads to me like government’s attempt to ‘get something out there’; guidance that is honourable, but hastily-written to fill a curriculum vacuum.

It’s as if the authors know there’s something missing, they just can’t quite put their finger on what.

And in some respects, this perplexity is to be expected – for we are all learning through the CfW experience; policymakers very much included.

That said, the next time government, the regional consortia, or indeed anyone else with a stake in our new curriculum feels the urge to issue a new release, I’d encourage them to reflect on the following questions:

  • What separates this document from other CfW documents?
  • What does it do that others don’t?
  • Is it coherent and does it talk to wider curriculum guidance?
  • Does it respond to a genuine need?
  • Does it give schools everything they need to know? If not, where can they go to find it?
  • And finally, will it make a difference?

Admittedly, these are not particularly challenging questions, but they should help test thinking in the rush to disseminate information.

We must be wary of the effects of ‘document overload’, and the risk that churning out more and more ‘stuff’ could drive practitioners further and further away from the narrow pathway to curriculum we’ve been set.

Fundamentally, busy teachers and leaders need assurance that what lands on their desks is worth their while – and not just the latest in a long line of ‘updates’ that promise a lot and deliver very little.

If we’re not careful, there’s every chance we’ll end up with precisely that we’ve been seeking to avoid and what was described in Scotland as ‘a fearsome hydra’ of materials that ‘has grown ever bigger and more daunting’.

Bottom line is we need considered, timely and relevant guidance, as opposed to pages and pages and pages of it.

One final point that links all previous points together, is the need in Wales for a proper support infrastructure that will co-ordinate professional learning, contribute to the development of resources and engage all stakeholders in collaborative networks.

Yes, this does happen to varying degrees now, but support is sporadic at best and very much dependent on where in the country you live.

The regional model of delivery is creaking badly (we now have five ‘regions’ and a lone local authority) and we’ll need a much more united front if we are to guarantee equality of opportunity moving forward.

Coincidentally, I’ve seen a number of tweets recently from teachers asking for colleagues’ views on key concepts, topics and themes – the nuts and bolts of curriculum design.

Now I know these types of conversation are often, by necessity, surface-level and designed to compare and contrast approaches quickly and easily to get a feel for what others in similar settings are doing.

And to be fair, I will always be the first to champion any such dialogue between educators at all levels of our system.

But in terms of preparing the profession – en masse – for what lies ahead, then surely it cannot be expected that teachers are to reach out to one another on social media for support and encouragement?

These professional discussions should be carefully and strategically brokered – and there are plenty of publicly-funded organisations, external to schools, that are particularly well-placed to oil the wheels.

The legwork associated with bringing people together is not to be underestimated and it is the job of these so-called support services to make the lives of tireless teachers that little bit easier.

Balancing curriculum and crisis

On the issue of infrastructure, however, there is cause for optimism. The much-trailed ‘National Network’ has been launched – at long last – and will soon see stakeholders from all three tiers of our education system coming together ‘to identify and address the barriers to, and opportunities for, the implementation of CfW’.

This network could, if properly managed, provide the platform for some of the creative and practical responses to the challenges I have posed in this blog.

My only concern is the suggestion that it will ‘complement the professional learning programmes being run by regional consortia and school improvement services’.

On the contrary, if it is convened by government and nationally-represented, it should drive not complement decision-making.

The bigger challenge will be ensuring what is discussed gets shared and how key themes are fed up, down and across the system.

And so, having written for far too long already (blogs of this length go against all convention), I’ll bring this particular brain-dump to a close.

My prevailing hope is that what I have written will make sense to those living it and be of some use to those watching it.

It is apprised by my many discussions with colleagues at various levels, and is designed to provocate reflection amongst those whose job it is to make CfW sing.

Covid has not gone away, let’s not forget, and balancing curriculum and crisis is a daily struggle that will only intensify as the countdown to September 2022 continues.

And so we owe it to all in our system to give teachers, leaders and support staff as much help as we possibly can in these most trying of times.

This feels like a defining moment in our education reform journey that requires us to look honestly at what is there, and what is missing.

And whether you agree with me or not, rest assured that what happens in the future will be wholly dependent on the decisions we take today.