Wales’ new curriculum framework has once again been brought into sharp focus following the release in December of education’s international ‘league tables’.
The Christmas present nobody really wanted, PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) results made tough reading for a nation still struggling to compete with the OECD average.
Yes there are important caveats, and PISA paints a somewhat skewed picture, but the top messages for Wales were not unfamiliar – standards of literacy and numeracy remain well below the levels expected.
Successive rounds of PISA, chief inspector reports and external assessment outcomes all point to a system falling short on key skills; an issue that could, if you believe the hyperbole, limit the life chances of tens of thousands of Welsh schoolchildren in an increasingly competitive jobs market.
I tend to look slightly more optimistically at the future for Wales and its education system, at least in part because of our caring, compassionate and high-skilled workforce – we have teachers and leaders to rival any in the world.
I know, because I’ve seen for myself what a difference to our children and their communities schools up and down the country are making – the issue, as ever, is how to make what we know to be good and effective practice measurable and a feature of our entire school stock.
Raising all boats is not easy and, in the context of education, a seemingly endless pursuit forever impacted by changes in politics, the financial climate and deep-seated social and cultural inequalities.
The developing Curriculum for Wales (launched in 2022 and being phased in gradually until all pupils aged 3-16 are benefitting from new curricular experiences in 2026) represents the nation’s latest attempt at tackling this challenge, and seeks to level a chronically uneven playing field by better serving the bespoke needs of individual learners.
Inspired by Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence, there is less prescribed content and more freedom for teachers to educate their pupils as they see fit, within the confines of a much looser curricular framework.
The alleged benefits of such a move (from prescription to autonomy) are twofold: one, it recognises that no school or learner is the same and allows scope for modification relative to where you are and who you are with; and two, it is more respecting of the professional voice of teachers and empowers those qualified to do the job to determine what best to teach and how.
It is something of a utopian vision that, in principle at least, very few will argue against. But ensuring that every child gets a fair crack at education is a much trickier proposition in a system that actively promotes and celebrates difference (with each school ploughing their own furrow, there will in effect be 1,463 variations on a curricular theme).
The core challenge, then, is how to maintain some semblance of consistency, while at the same time respecting local ownership and decision-making.
Degrees of flexibility and freedom
In education, perhaps more than in any other public service, equity of opportunity is written in tablets of stone.
But there are genuine concerns that the transition from prescription to what scholars have called ‘genericism’, will result in an even bigger disparity in the knowledge and skills available to learners and thus widen what we know to be a pernicious and totally unacceptable attainment gap between deprived pupils and their more affluent peers.
For teachers and leaders, the lack of clear policy advice as to what degrees of flexibility and freedom schools are actually allowed has given rise to an unease within the profession that what they do might be frowned upon.
Instead, those charged with putting the new curriculum into practice need confidence that their interpretations of what is acceptable (and there will be many, let’s not forget) are in line with expectation – both at a government-level and, perhaps more significantly, in the eyes of the inspectorate.
After all, it is Estyn, as the chief purveyor of school standards in Wales, that will ultimately decide whether or not a school is operating in accordance with curriculum guidelines.
The difficulty for schools is that they have no way of knowing what ‘good’ looks like, over and above a deliberately open list of ‘contributory factors’ that policymakers have determined to be the benchmark of successful curriculum realisation.
Described as an ‘important reference for schools when evaluating their own curriculum’, and part of a new national framework for evaluation, improvement and accountability,the factors include: enabling all learners to progress, ensuring the school environment supports learner wellbeing, investing in ambitious professional learning, and being at the heart of their communities.
One could argue that such things are essential to the effectiveness of any school, regardless of curriculum. So too are they open to interpretation, and without more concrete specification as to what e.g. enabling all learners to progress means in practice, schools run the risk of inadvertently veering too far from convention.
National programme
There are, by my estimation, two possible ways around this. The first, heavily resisted for fear of subverting teacher agency, is that we introduce some sort of ‘common core’, or list of non-negotiables that all schools, in all parts of Wales are required in law to teach.
A more descriptive statutory content, outside that which exists already, would ensure at least some degree of uniformity across the piece; how detailed that compulsory list is would be subject to a ‘national conversation’ on what we want our children to grow up knowing.
The second and alternative route out of our curriculum quandary, is the provision of high-quality professional learning that is readily available to all.
Far from empowering teachers, it could be argued that Curriculum for Wales has in fact de-skilled those in our system who were not already involved in curriculum co-construction, and have had no prior exposure to curriculum design.
All of a sudden, and through no fault of their own, teachers have gone from a position of strength – based on their understanding of what to do within much tighter curricular parameters – to one of relative weakness.
This does not mean that good teachers become any less good as a consequence, more that they need additional support – and, in some cases, new skills – so as to respond most appropriately to what is being asked of them.
The commission of a genuinely national programme of professional learning that is evidence-based and accessible to teachers, wherever in Wales they work, would give hope that the prescriptive tightrope can be successfully navigated.
A mandatory module or ‘starter kit’ for schools in the tricky art of curriculum design (in relation to what the Welsh Government is now calling a ‘purpose-led, process-orientated’ model), would help cut through the noise and help our time-poor teaching profession re-set ready for the challenges ahead.
Then again, we might just begin by asking teachers what they need and what they are not getting at the moment.
- This blog first appeared in the Times Educational Supplement in February 2024.
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