Dr Tom Breeze, Programme Leader, PGCE Secondary Music at Cardiff Metropolitan University and co-host of Emma & Tom Talk Teaching Podcast and Co investigator of the CDiD project asks ‘What is the Curriculum for Wales?’

In 2015, after a period touring Wales consulting with teachers, Professor Graham Donaldson from the University of Glasgow published his report, Successful Futures. The report made 68 recommendations about how to reform the school curriculum in Wales, all of which were accepted by the Welsh Government. Donaldson was known as the architect of Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence, and the recommendations in Successful Futures were along the same lines as his work in Scotland. 

The philosophy behind the reforms can be linked to what Professor Mark Priestley has called a new ‘curricular turn’, which aims to ‘future-proof’ school curricula in the face of a 21^st century world in which learners may work in jobs in adulthood which did not exist when they started their educational journey. In 2013 and 2017, IBE-UNESCO published reports which aimed to reconceptualise curriculum for what they call the fourth industrial revolution, and in 2018, the OECD defined ‘transformative competences’ which attempted to capture the higher-level abilities which future citizens would need to possess in order to thrive in the modern world. 

The Curriculum for Wales itself was not written by Graham Donaldson, but co-constructed by teachers, supported by curriculum experts, in a ‘pioneer’ process which resulted, in 2020, in the publication of the curriculum itself. The curriculum is centred around four ‘purposes’, essentially statements of intent about the qualities and dispositions of learners within the Welsh education system. It says that they should be:

• Ambitious, capable learners ready to learn throughout their lives
• Healthy, confident individuals ready to lead fulfilling lives as valued members of society
• Ethical, informed citizens ready to be citizens of Wales and the world
• Enterprising, creative contributers ready to play a full part in life and work.

The curriculum framework itself defines three cross-curricular skills – literacy, numeracy and digital competence – which are the responsibility of all teachers to develop in the context of their phase and subject specialisms. Then, what we would recognise as traditional ‘subjects’ are collected within six Areas of Learning and Experience (AoLEs), with the intention that ‘powerful connections’ can, where appropriate, be made between the subjects in order to make learning more meaningful and authentic. For example, the expressive arts AoLE contains the subjects of art, dance, drama, film & digital media and music. 

While the curriculum defines a certain amount of high-level information about the AoLEs and the individual subjects contained within it, the fine detail (such as subject-specific content or skills) is left open so that schools can design a curriculum which is relevant and meaningful in their specific local context. This is known as ‘subsidiarity’. 

The curriculum was introduced in primary schools in 2022, while in secondary schools a year-by-year introduction was chosen. At the time of writing, years 7-9 are using the new version of the curriculum. 

As schools in Wales have grappled with a new approach which requires them to be designers of their own curriculum, rather than deliverers of a standardised national curriculum, some commentators have raised concerns about the level of challenge this poses for teachers and school leaders. These include criticisms of a perceived downgrading of knowledge (given the lack of specificity in the framework documents), the apparent absence of a national strategy to provide teachers with the required professional learning, warnings about increased inequity and incoherence in the system (especially at the point of transition between primary and secondary), and phase-specific challenges which are entirely different in the primary and secondary age groups. 

More recently, an ITV News investigation pointed to concerns about a lack of clear guidance on the teaching of reading to primary-aged children, and the Cabinet Secretary for Education, Lynne Neagle, in a statement to the Senedd (Welsh parliament) acknowledged concerns about variation in outcomes in the secondary sector in particular. 

We hope that our project can go some way to supporting secondary schools as they explore the cross-subject learning opportunities which have opened up as a result of the Welsh reforms, while ensuring that the ‘cherished ideas and ways of thinking that each subject contains’ can be protected and celebrated. 

Author: Dr Tom Breeze