Lynne Neagle’s first statement in the Senedd, titled “delivering on Wales’ education priorities” was anything but. What the new cabinet secretary for education actually set out was what her and her department’s priorities are. Maybe Ms Neagle needs a little guidance on how direct communication works. A better title for her statement might have been “Our National Mission: what we care about in education, but don’t currently have any tangible plans for”.
Again, she outlined how passionate she is about the myriad of problems that education in Wales is currently facing: the stark drop in standards of learning in Wales according to PISA, the widening attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their peers, the curriculum reform process, the ALN implementation problems, the crisis in teacher recruitment and retention, the need for strengthened school leadership, the behaviour issues in schools, the middle tier review and the need for better professional learning for teachers, the highly contentious reform of the school year consultation, the problems with Welsh language development, Ms Neagle is passionate about them all.
Tom Giffard, a conservative MS, summed up her statement pretty clearly: “We don’t want warm words, we want a plan.”
This statement was nothing like a plan. A plan is desperately needed in Wales, but many feel that the plans that have been issued recently have failed to address the key problems listed above. Having one Labour minister take over the education portfolio from another Labour minister, seems to have caused an abrupt slowing of pace.
Ms Neagle did promise more detail in the form of her oral statement in July, which will be the CfW reform annual report. She also promised a ‘Raising attainment and school standards’ plan by the end of the summer term, which will be four months after her appointment. Her predecessor Jeremy Miles published his the “Renew and Reform Plan” just six weeks after his appointment. Whilst the slower pace Ms Neagle is adopting may come as welcome relief to change fatigued teachers and leaders, all of the problems the education system is currently facing, are languishing in limbo.
Ms Neagle did mention several pieces of support that teachers had asked for and her department are currently working on. They are:
- “More national professional learning for curriculum design that builds on the ‘Understanding by Design’ pilot.” The resources for this programme will be shared nationally by the Autumn term
- “Simplified detail on what progression looks like, that will help schools understand expectations at different points.”
- “Examples of curriculum content.” What topics and contexts could be used across the curriculum.
- “Templates to support school and teacher planning both for designing curricula and for assessing the progress learners are making.”
- “Better support for schools to build a shared understanding of learners’ progression to raise the bar on evaluations of progress across schools and enable a more consistent level of challenge across schools’ curricula.”
Let’s take each of these items of support one by one. The ‘Understanding by Design’ pilot using McTighe and Wiggins international programme and digital platform was very well received by schools. Making the resources from the pilot course available across Wales makes sense. However, this is not the same as actually providing curriculum design professional learning for all teachers. It’s costing £35,000, and it will still require teachers to have the time and inclination to engage. It is most definitely not the same as a professional learning entitlement as it still relies on teachers finding time to do it for themselves. DIY professional learning.
“Simplified detail” – now there’s an oxymoron. A contradiction in terms. Maybe this is what the Welsh Government is actually an expert at, seemingly completing the impossible task, making something simpler, by adding more details. But certainly, helping schools to understand what expectations or standards should be at different stages of development would be really helpful. Especially given there are currently no clear standards in CfW, so it’ll be quite an achievement to make this happen!
The “examples of curriculum content” could mean all kinds of things. In Owain Lloyd’s presentation to the Policy Forum Wales he seemed to suggest the examples would serve as a guide to help teachers select content for their curriculum that would help pupils reach the Four Purposes. No mention was made of how this would align with schools’ autonomy in addressing pupils’ needs though. You can’t both give a generic example of how to select content and show people how to do it for their own specific learner needs. Another seemingly impossible task WG has been set by teachers. We’d suggest multiple step-by-step worked examples from real school contexts might be more helpful. It’s what we use in our workshops and what teachers find incredibly helpful.
The idea that the Welsh Government is going to be providing planning templates for curriculum design and assessing progress, sounds suspiciously like the thing they have spent decades trying to avoid, a single way of doing it. If the template, or templates suggests there is a good way of doing it, then it better be research-informed, tried and tested and in line with teachers’ expectations, or there will be trouble. Ms Neagle repeated her understanding that some schools “are really flying with the new curriculum”. So, this will no doubt be optional, not mandatory. Support for those who need or want it, not for all.
The last bullet point is the most opaque of them all. We are back to this “shared understanding of progression”. The concept that will save the day in terms of consistency and equity of educational experience across Wales. The fact that there are no common standards, no common progression sequence, no common or specified knowledge, just woolly narrative statements and big ideas, means there is also no equity. There is also no way to share an understanding of something that isn’t the same across all schools. Progress means knowing more over time. Being better at something over time. The problem is that there are only two ways to know that your understanding of a pupils’ progress is exactly the same as my understanding of that pupils’ progress. One is to quantify that progress, to put a number on it, to give it a grade, a percentage, a score. Which is entirely against the ethos of Curriculum for Wales. The other is to directly compare like with like. Which is impossible if what your pupil is learning is different to what my pupil is learning. So, there we have it. Having a “common” and “consistent level of challenge” across multiple different, local curricula is impossible.
Our new cabinet secretary for education has both announced nothing, and something enormous. We wish her luck, but feel resigned to the fact, that our third education minister in succession has failed to recognise teachers need more than some distant plans for professional learning. What the children of Wales deserve is a curriculum model that takes not from one extreme of educational theory or the other, but the best of both worlds. One that specifies a minimum common core, where direct comparisons can be made, but also a mandatory local autonomy that requires difference and unique needs to be addressed.