Teacher workload is a “massive” problem in Wales, according to Mary van den Heuvel, senior policy officer for NEU Cymru.
A member of the NEU executive recently summed up the situation as “experienced staff are struggling and new staff are drowning”, she says.
Schools are not just struggling because of “the pace and demands of curriculum reform”, says Ms van den Heuvel. They also cannot get enough supply teachers; they are trying to implement additional learning needs reform at the same time as the new curriculum; and pupil absence is still running high, having failed to return to pre-pandemic levels, with Year 11 particularly badly affected.
“Children have to want to come to school before we can actually make sure we have got the curriculum right for them,” she adds.
Ms van den Heuvel was speaking at a conference on the implementation of Curriculum for Wales (CfW) - run by Policy Forum for Wales - where a primary headteacher also raised another pressure bearing down on school leaders: funding.
The headteacher, Louise Jones, said the pupils in her school “love the new way of learning” in CfW, but that it was having to be subsidised by school fêtes and discos.
She made a plea: “I really would like everybody to think hard about where money is going at the moment - do we need all these priorities at once when we want to get this right for these pupils?”
Also today - on the same day as the CfW conference - new research examining school leaders’ early experiences of rolling out the new curriculum has been published by the Welsh government. One key finding is that senior leaders trying to realise the CfW vision in their schools want reassurance they are “on the right track” - and calls for more support.
It says: “Senior leaders frequently referred to a desire for reassurance that the approaches they are taking to curriculum planning, progression and, particularly, assessment were appropriate (and ‘on the right track’). While collaborative working between schools goes some way to providing reassurance, Welsh government should consider whether there is a need for a role that provides external constructive challenge to schools (particularly around progression and assessment) during these early years of implementation.”
A special school senior leader quoted in the research says they are “worried that [schools inspectorate] Estyn will think we are doing it wrong”. Meanwhile, a senior leader in an all-through Welsh medium school says teachers are trialling the new curriculum but there is “a lot of uncomfortable uncertainty”.
The new curriculum started being introduced in Wales in all primaries and around half of secondaries - beginning with Year 7 pupils - at the start of the current academic year in September. The other half of secondary schools will officially begin implementation at the start of the new academic year in Years 7 and 8.
In the conference, the need for a common understanding “about what good looks like” was also raised.
Primary headteacher Louise Jones, of Maes Y Morfa Primary Community School in Llanelli, said three different advisers had provided three different sets of feedback on the same learning experience in her school. She said: “The difficulty for us is that we are monitored by the middle tier who are learning at the same pace as we are.”
She said: “Some might say, ‘Well, you’ve got a budget, you could resource it from that’. Well, actually, everyone knows how tight the budget is at the moment - human resources and resources for pupils are difficult. So we are supplementing with extracurricular activities, supported by our pupils and our governors.”
For others, this uncertainty about whether they were on the right track when it came to the new curriculum stemmed from not knowing what the new qualifications - currently being developed to chime with CfW - will look like.
Ms van den Heuvel said this was not because teachers believe in teaching to the test - but because exam results still mattered.
The new qualifications are currently being developed and are due to be finalised by September 2024, with delivery beginning in 2025 and the first exams sat in 2027.
Speaking to Tes last year, Philip Blaker, the chief executive of Qualification Wales, said the goal of the qualifications reform was to ensure alignment with the aspirations of the new curriculum. He said there would be a general shift towards more non-exam assessment - and away from “terminal assessment” - which he said would allow “more local curricula to come through”.
Lloyd Hopkin, the Welsh government’s head of curriculum reform, told the conference the education minister Jeremy Miles was clear - and the evidence supported his view - that “schools have made the best possible start in light of what have been some quite significant challenges over the last number of years”.
He added that the new research into early implementation showed “there is progress” and that “schools are really engaging with this question of autonomy”.
He acknowledged that there was “variability” between schools and said that needed to be an increasing focus going forward, but he also said “reforms of this scale take time” and Wales was “at the beginning of quite a long journey here”.
He added that through networks and discussions with the profession, “a better understanding of what good looks like” would emerge, but there would likely be “an element of iteration” given that “this is the first time we have gone through these reforms”.
