As of September, Welsh primary schools will be expected to begin introducing Curriculum for Wales (CfW).

The original plan was that pupils in the first year of secondary should also start to experience the new curriculum from September. But in response to the pandemic, secondaries now have the option of pushing ahead with plans to start in 2022 with Year 7, or they can start in 2023 with Years 7 and 8 together.

The new curriculum is being described by Jeremy Miles, minister for education and the Welsh language, as “a once-in-a-generation chance to revolutionise the quality of opportunity for our children and young people.”

So what do we know about the plans so far - and what impact will they have on qualifications?

Why is the Welsh curriculum changing?

CfW borrows heavily from the Scottish curriculum introduced from 2010, Curriculum for Excellence (CfE), which is perhaps unsurprising given it was a Scottish former senior chief inspector of education, Professor Graham Donaldson, who wrote the 2015 report, Successful futures, which provided the impetus for the Welsh reforms.

In a nutshell, CfW aims to make the curriculum fit for the 21st century and give more power to teachers to make decisions about how to teach and what to teach within the curriculum.

A government website aimed at parents says: “The national curriculum was first introduced in 1988 before online shopping, Google and the cloud. Now, work is different, technology is different, society is changing. The curriculum must prepare young people to thrive in a future where digital skills, adaptability and creativity - alongside knowledge - are crucial.”

What will that mean in practice?

Schools are being asked to design their own curricula, within the requirements of a national framework, “with the four purposes at the heart”.

The four purposes of CfW are:

• Ambitious, capable learners
• Enterprising, creative contributors
• Ethical, informed citizens
• Healthy, confident individuals

In Wales, the new curricula must also “reflect the six areas of learning and experience”, which are:

• Expressive arts
• Health and wellbeing
• Humanities
• Languages, literacy and communication
• Mathematics and numeracy
• Science and technology

In addition to these areas, a school curriculum must also include the following mandatory elements:

• Religion, values and ethics
• Relationships and sexuality education (RSE)
• Welsh
• English

It must also have embedded within it the following cross-curricular skills, which are considered so important it will be the responsibility of all teachers to strengthen and develop them. They are:

• Literacy
• Numeracy
• Digital competence

All of this will be familiar to Scottish teachers - CfE is underpinned by the “four capacities”, which align closely with CfW’s four purposes. CfE also has three elements that are described as the responsibility of all teachers, but in Scotland, these are literacy, numeracy, and health and wellbeing.

Another key difference is that while CfE is meant to span the ages of 3-18, CfW only covers 3-16.

Why are secondary schools being given longer to start delivering the new curriculum?

Jeremy Miles, minister for education and the Welsh language, announced the decision to provide “some additional flexibility” for schools in July last year owing to the pandemic. He said that secondary schools had faced “specific challenges” such as managing qualifications due to the cancellation of the exams and that had, in some instances, “affected their readiness for curriculum delivery”.

“In 2022, schools that are ready to roll out the curriculum to Year 7 may do so, but this will not be mandatory until 2023, with roll-out to Years 7 and 8 together,” Mr Miles said.

Will there be changes to the qualifications students take?

The goal is for the new qualifications to be taught for the first time in September 2025, when the first full cohort to experience CfW is due to start Year 10. In summer 2027, the new qualifications will be awarded for the first time.

What about GCSEs and A levels?

It has been decided that the GCSE brand will stay in Wales - a consultation that ran from November 2019 to February 2020 found that 77 per cent of those who responded said they either strongly agreed or agreed that the name should be kept. However, the GCSEs will “change to reflect the changing curriculum”.

There are no plans to make changes to A levels, with Curriculum for Wales being a 3-16 curriculum, rather than a 3-18 curriculum as in Scotland. However, Qualifications Wales has acknowledged that any changes “could have a knock-on effect for the qualifications that learners go on to study next”. It says that “where necessary, we will look at specific changes to post-16 provision”.

What changes will be made to GCSEs?

In October 2021, Qualifications Wales published a report detailing the future range of subjects that should be available as GCSEs and a small range of related made-for-Wales qualifications that should be available alongside them.

The proposal that “divided opinions the most and attracted the highest level of disagreement”, according to the report, was for a new combined language and literature GCSE in English, which would be roughly equivalent to 1.5 standard GCSEs.

Just 30 per cent of respondents agreed or strongly agreed with the change, but Qualifications Wales has decided to push ahead anyway. It says that having two distinct subjects is “historical” and has created an “artificial division”, and argues that integration will lead to a more “broad and balanced education”, as well as better engagement.

There are also plans for a new combined GCSE maths and numeracy qualification to replace the two existing GCSEs in maths and maths-numeracy. A new GCSE science qualification is planned to replace the six existing science GCSEs, and is likely to be roughly equivalent to two standard GCSEs.

Qualifications Wales is consulting on the qualifications that should be available alongside the new GCSEs, with a closing date of 31 January.

When will it be revealed how the new qualifications will be assessed?

Qualifications Wales says: “We know that teachers need enough time to prepare for new qualifications, so we’re planning to get changes finalised well ahead of first teaching.”

How do teachers feel about the changes?

After Qualifications Wales published its decisions regarding changes to the GCSEs, it was reported that teaching unions and school leaders’ organisations were calling for a delay, warning that continued Covid disruption left schools scant time to effectively engage in the proposals.

When it comes to the new curriculum, in a blog post in January of this year, academic and former education journalist Gareth Evans writes that too often schools have been left to “take on the daunting challenge of curriculum change by themselves”.

He says that “a truly national professional learning programme, that is consistent and available to all, is very much needed”, adding: “It is genuinely alarming that six years into our curriculum expedition, there is still so much confusion around what the curriculum actually means.”