Emyr George, the first chief executive of Wales’ new arm’s length educational resources body, is keen to stress that it is “very, very early days” for Adnodd.
For now, George is the only salaried member of staff at the body, which has been charged by education minister Jeremy Miles with ensuring that teachers and schools have access to “high-quality educational resources made in Wales, for Wales”.
The key driver for the creation of Adnodd - which means “resource” in Welsh - has, of course, been the introduction of the new Welsh curriculum.
Curriculum for Wales: ‘A major departure’
Curriculum for Wales (CfW) began being introduced in primary schools and around half of secondaries in September 2022. This academic year the remaining secondaries got on board.
It is “a major departure” and a “really fundamentally different curriculum”, says George, and there will need to be “appropriate and sufficient provision of resources to support all learners”.
The creation of Adnodd will, he says, also be an opportunity to improve the availability of Welsh language resources.
Adnodd commissioned research last year to help it understand the current resources landscape, and what might be needed in the future.
That research - shared exclusively with Tes - found that Welsh-medium resources were “lacking in quality and variety, especially in comparison to English-medium resources” and recommended that Adnodd prioritise “production of Welsh-medium and bilingual resource”.
George, who in his previous role at Qualifications Wales spearheaded the creation of the new Made-for-Wales GCSE due to be introduced from September 2025, sums up the role of Adnodd as being to “provide a strategic, bird’s-eye overview of the educational resources landscape in Wales”.
“There’s lots of different activity that happens around the commissioning and production of resources in Wales but there is never one version of the truth, if you like, in terms of where we are up to, what’s out there, what’s available,” he says.
Adnodd won’t typically have the capacity to create resources itself - rather it will commission others to fill gaps and priority areas, as well as bring more coherence, and quality-assure, what is already out there.
George says the body will be small “but big enough to make a difference”.
Making things happen
Adnodd will have 10 to 20 staff, he says, and a budget of around £2 million in the coming financial year and £4 million the year after that.
“We don’t want to duplicate the capacity and expertise that’s already out there. We want to be that catalyst, that organisation that can really help pull people together and make things happen, and not try to deliver it all ourselves,” George says.
This, he says, is likely to have a positive impact on current content creators, including Welsh publishers.
“We have quite a vibrant and healthy publishing sector, who perhaps in the past struggled to compete with your Pearsons and Hodders - the really large global outfits that would target the GCSE and A-level market because it is an international market. But there is a lot of expertise and creative talent in Wales and perhaps we haven’t been making the most of that,” he says.
This stands in rather stark contrast to the position that England’s online learning platform, Oak National Academy, has found itself in - there are concerns that it is having a negative impact on the education resources market in the UK.
However, George feels there are some lessons that Adnodd can learn from Oak - not least its “very clean” and “very simple” website.
The plan is that resources to support CfW will be made available through the Welsh online learning platform, Hwb, which all teachers and learners in Wales have access to.
However, the same Adnodd-commissioned research that flagged the need for better provision of Welsh resources has also highlighted that “content creators, and parents and carers all cited challenges with the platform’s accessibility, impacting its effectiveness”.
Helping teachers find what they need
George wants to improve Hwb so that teachers can find “what they need, when they need it”.
“Sometimes people say there’s a need for something but maybe the need is to know where to find it,” he says.
However, gaps that need to be addressed are also becoming apparent, he adds.
Early priorities, George says, will be literacy and numeracy resources to support improvement in these areas, following Wales’ disappointing Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) results and the school inspectorate’s comments that knowledge and skills in these areas remain weaker than pre-pandemic.
He also identifies a need to support listening and talking skills in Welsh, which took a hit when pupils’ exposure to the language dipped during the pandemic when schools closed.
Health and wellbeing is a bigger focus under CfW, so George also predicts there will be a need there.
Teachers and schools, George hopes, will begin to benefit from the fruits of Adnodd’s labours in the autumn term. Adnodd, he says, hopes “to hit the ground running over the summer and do some early commissioning”.
Good resources, he says, will help bring the curriculum to life: “Getting this piece right on resources is going to be so crucial to helping teachers make a success of the curriculum.”
