No one could accuse Jeremy Miles of resting on his laurels, just after marking his second year in the role.
Reform of the Welsh education system was already well underway when Miles took on the education portfolio, but he has overseen the introduction of the new curriculum in primaries and around half of secondaries this academic year - and later this month, Qualifications Wales will be finalising its proposals for the new made-for-Wales GCSEs.
Inspection is also being overhauled; reform of additional support for learning is underway; universal free school meals in primary are being rolled out; and the government is even considering rejigging the school holidays to address problems caused by the “long summer and uneven terms”.
Among all of this, of course, there was the teacher pay dispute, which was resolved in March following strike action by the NEU Cymru teaching union.
Among teachers there is enthusiasm for much of the reform underway in Wales but also frustration that - at a time when the pressure on schools has rarely been more acute - so much is being introduced all at once.
At a recent conference, a Welsh primary head - who was enthusiastic about the new curriculum, saying her pupils “love the new way of learning” - made a plea for a bit of breathing space, saying: “Do we need all these priorities at once?”
But Miles says the reforms are interconnected and feed into two key priorities: putting the learner at the heart of the life of the school and putting trust back in the hands of teachers.
“It’s really important you have a coherent guiding set of principles via reforms otherwise...we just get lots of different strands of reform that just stand alone, but it’s really important to see the whole picture,” he says.
“So if you look at the reforms we are doing to the curriculum, to additional learning needs, they’re very much part of the same agenda, which is to make sure that the individual needs of learners are prioritised. And delivering that by giving teachers much more flexibility and creativity within a national framework about how you devise the curriculum. My own experience is that teachers are extremely enthusiastic about that.”
Miles also says that the funding to support curricular reform is “extremely significant” and there are also “very large budgets going in for additional learning needs reform”.
Still, he says that “when we get concerns, we will respond to them pragmatically” - in March it was announced that another year would be given for additional needs reform to be implemented and secondary schools were given the option of delaying the launch of Curriculum for Wales (CfW) for a year. About half chose to do so.
Miles continues: “In Wales - unlike in England - the funding that we’ve made available for post-Covid recovery is still provided. So that budget has not been reduced this year, despite the absence of any funding from Westminster. So we’ve maintained that and we’ve increased our pupil deprivation grant funding, which reflects the needs of those on free school meals. So in each of those areas, we have sought to make further funding available.
“Are there pressures on school budgets? There absolutely are. The cost-of-living pressures and the impact of inflation is very real in school budgets and also in local government budgets.”
Miles says that, in recent times, the government has provided “historically high levels of funding” to local authorities, which directly fund schools, but again he acknowledges that “there are pressures on budgets” and “there’s no doubt about it”.
The Welsh government’s own budget, he says, is worth “about £900 million less than when it was set because of the cost of inflation”.
Against this somewhat bleak backdrop, teachers are attempting to transform the Welsh education system.
Curriculum for Wales
CfW is described as “a once-in-a-generation chance to revolutionise the quality of opportunity” for pupils and make the curriculum fit for the 21st century - a government website aimed at parents points out the national curriculum was first introduced in 1988, “before online shopping, Google and the cloud”.
For anyone familiar with the Scottish system, CfW has uncanny echoes of its issues and its Curriculum for Excellence (CfE).
This is perhaps unsurprising given it was a Scot, Professor Graham Donaldson, who wrote the 2015 report Successful Futures, which provided the impetus for the Welsh reforms.
So, has Wales learned from Scotland’s mistakes? Miles says it has, in terms of “approaches to evaluation”, “approaches to progression” and “the importance of aligning qualifications with a curriculum”.
He says Qualifications Wales is undertaking a review of GCSEs “to make sure that they reflect the curriculum”, with those qualifications to be taught for the first time in 2025 and first awarded in 2027.
However, with CfW, a 3-16 curriculum, there are no plans to change the qualifications that follow the GCSEs; based on the Scottish experience, this could be a big mistake.
A 2021 review of the implementation of the Scottish curriculum, by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), found that although Scotland had attempted to reform all its national qualifications, “misalignment between CfE’s aspirations and the qualification system became a barrier to CfE’s implementation in secondary education”.
The OECD said the focus on traditional exams was having “backwash effects on teaching practices and learning experiences” that were at odds with CfE - not just in upper secondary, but also in lower secondary.
Is there not, therefore, a danger that Wales just ends up in exactly the same position, because the post-16 curriculum and qualifications are not changing?
Miles says: “Obviously we want to make sure we have a coherent system, so we will look at what we need to do in the 16-19 space to make that qualifications and the curriculum best prepare young people.
“But I agree with you that you need to make sure there is a coherent and consistent approach between curriculum and qualifications at all stages - and that it’s taught in a way that best supports the progression of learners, obviously.”
‘Made for Wales’
So, will the A levels go through the same reform process as the GCSEs so that they, too, are “made for Wales”? Miles says that is the question being considered at the moment.
Speaking to Tes last year, the chief executive of Qualifications Wales, Philip Blaker, explained why post-16 reform was a delicate balancing act.
He said Qualifications Wales was “mindful about going too far with A-level reforms, given that learners in Wales are engaging in a UK higher education system” and the need to ensure that A levels have the same value in Wales as in England.
Meanwhile, secondary staff are keenly awaiting the outcome of the qualification reforms. CfW is being delivered to Year 7 pupils in half of secondaries with the other half due to start with Years 7 and 8 in September.
Calls for more information about how these students will be assessed when they reach upper secondary are growing. The new qualifications are not due to be finalised until September 2024, a year before teachers start delivering courses.
Miles says: “I do understand teachers saying, ‘Well, it’s challenging for us to teach the curriculum without knowing the qualifications’ [but] the fundamental starting point of this is that the curriculum and teaching the curriculum is what we expect teachers to do, and that’s what we expect young people to benefit from and the qualifications will reflect that. So, if you are preparing for the curriculum, you are preparing for the new qualifications.”
With the first year of CfW implementation almost at an end, research into schools’ early experiences was published in April.
It found senior school leaders were “content with the progress they had made to date in designing and implementing their curriculum” but also that they wanted reassurance that they were “on the right track”.
Miles says regular evaluation will be a feature of Welsh curricular reform. More information on exactly what form the evaluation will take is to be revealed early next month, but the goal is to “keep a real-time view on how the curriculum is rolling out” by speaking to students and teachers about their experiences.
That is all well and good but, given a tough economic and recruitment climate just now, there is a looming question of whether there will even be enough money and support for schools to navigate this period of fundamental reform.
That is a constant worry, yet, at the moment in Wales, there is still optimism amid the undoubted trepidation about a curriculum that - as Miles puts it - is all about giving “teachers the freedom to focus on the learner”.
