Depending on who you talk to, Welsh education is either in “crisis” or subject to the most exciting raft of reforms seen at any point since devolution.
The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, albeit there is little doubt that the current educational landscape in Wales is fraught with challenges.
Some are of our own making (the aforementioned raft of reforms being the result of policy decisions taken by government), whereas others are, to some extent at least, out of human control (fallout from the pandemic is very much ongoing).
Floundering in the eye of a storm
Either way, educators right across Wales’ education system are floundering in the eye of a storm; there are serious issues with behaviour and attendance, and a well-documented slide in key skills gives rise to concern that attainment gaps are widening.
All of this comes against a backdrop of punishing financial constraints, with in-year budgets being slashed and schools being plunged deep into the red.
Many are making teachers redundant rather than recruiting, and I know of schools cutting back on heating and turning off corridor lights to save money.
The excitement of a new made-in-Wales curriculum, with all its promise of teacher empowerment and professional respect, is starting to drain away and being replaced by a frustration among teachers that they can’t do what they had planned.
There simply isn’t space in the busy school calendar for teachers to step back from the chalkface and explore new curricular arrangements in the depth they would like, and in some cases, need to.
It’s not that they don’t want to engage in curriculum reform, but more that they feel they cannot do it justice.
These are, without question, testing times for everybody; yet this is the reality of what faces Wales’ new Cabinet secretary for education.
Wales’ new education chief
Appointed last month by new first minister Vaughan Gething, Lynne Neagle is one of just a handful of Senedd “originals”, having been a member of the Welsh Parliament since its inception in 1999.
But while she knows better than most her way around the Cardiff Bay debating chamber, she is relatively inexperienced at the top table and has to date had little active participation in government.
Wales’ new education chief had never before held a senior Cabinet position, and was only brought into the fold in 2021 as deputy minister for mental health and wellbeing.
To step into the education breach now, with fires raging all over the place, must be daunting. However, Neagle is by no means unversed in the language of education and was chair of the Senedd’s Children, Young People and Education Committee for five years from 2016-2021.
Acute pressures on schools
She knows well, therefore, the acute financial pressures on schools, the damaging effect of Covid-19 on children’s learning, and the demands of an overcrowded reform agenda on our industrious teaching workforce.
This made Neagle’s recent response to an independent review of teachers’ pay and conditions, her first major announcement since her appointment last month, all the more peculiar.
The Independent Welsh Pay Review Body (IWPRB), established in 2019 following the devolution of responsibility for teachers’ pay and conditions to Wales from Westminster, made a series of recommendations to the Welsh government with a view to helping it “achieve a fairer and more transparent system”.
Pay and workload recommendations
The group’s proposals included the introduction of a consolidated pay scale, an increase in the minimum headteacher salary and the development of a workload reduction plan.
Clarification over the maximum number of teaching hours a teacher can be expected to work per week, the promotion of flexible working and the potential for nationally-funded sabbaticals were also suggested.
Much of this will have come as no great shock to officials, who entertain similar discussions with trade unions on a fairly regular basis.
What raised eyebrows was the new Cabinet secretary’s uncompromising retort, in which she accepted “in principle” the IWPRB’s advice, but warned that implementation of the recommendations ”will only occur where they can be shown to be either cost neutral or are able to be met from existing budgets”.
In other words, she agrees with what was said, but there isn’t the money within government to pay for it. Suffice it to say her comments did not go down well with education’s rank and file.
And it had all started so promisingly; a courteous introductory letter to the system struck the right chord and acknowledged the need for all in society (not just schools, as is so often the expectation) to come together to counter Covid’s after-effects.
The extent to which she can make that happen, however, is unclear and a joined-up, cross-departmental approach is crucial if we are to properly support a generation of children and young people who missed out on what so many before them had enjoyed.
‘Creeping behemoth’ of Curriculum for Wales
Other matters requiring attention include the Curriculum for Wales, a creeping behemoth with so much potential, but with multiple points of failure; issues related to the amount of prescribed content, professional learning and assessment approaches are as salient now as when the reform journey first started.
A decision on the future of Wales’ “middle-tier” is also required to avoid a regression to old ways of working; local authorities do not on their own have the capacity to properly support schools, and Neagle’s own constituency of Torfaen is itself subject to stringent Estyn monitoring.
The break-up of Wales’ regional school improvement model is already in train regardless and all parties, least not those with livelihoods at stake, need some sort of clarity on what happens next.
But if there’s one thing that Neagle should consider, above all else, it’s the centrality of the profession to all she is seeking to achieve.
It is often said that the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers, and it’s essential that Wales’ new education secretary invests heavily in listening, learning from and liberating those whose job it is to educate and inspire.
Dr Gareth Evans is director of education policy at University of Wales Trinity Saint David. He writes in a personal capacity and tweets @garethdjevans
