Don’t let a potentially brilliant curriculum go to waste
The trouble with schools is that greed, power and politics from above, just get in the way of progress.
I wasn’t going to post on here anymore, but I just couldn’t resist . . .
I read this linked article yesterday, which ran with the headline: “Welsh education in ‘crisis’ as fears mount that reforms will leave poorer children worse off.”
Two things made me wonder if we will ever change education for the better. The first came on reading the following quote:
“The new Curriculum for Wales, rolled out since 2019, involves giving schools more autonomy over what they teach and assess, with the responsibility of designing and implementing it transferred from civil servants to teachers. Its emphasis is on skills and pupil wellbeing, rather than the procurement of specific knowledge.”
The Welsh Curriculum is potentially brilliant. However, it is measured in ‘units’ irrelevant to the curriculum. Just as we wouldn’t measure how long our journey is in kilograms, we shouldn’t measure the success of this curriculum in relation to performance in exams. As the article points out, the Welsh curriculum focuses on skills and wellbeing rather than the procurement of specific knowledge as assessed in our current exam system.
There are two ‘if only’s’ that arise from this:
If only Welsh Government had been brave enough to permit Qualification Wales to move away from the GCSE brand. A hybrid model of assessment, which assesses a young person’s ability to identify the appropriate knowledge they need, analyse, critique and sort/organise it, and then go on to present or apply it, would be more relevant to a young person’s learning needs, than simply recalling and regurgitating information, most of which they won’t recall a few weeks following the exam.
If only the Welsh Government had provided more time, support and resources to give schools the space and energy to focus on the pedagogy required to teach and, more importantly, ‘facilitate’ the implementation of this curriculum.
The development of this pedagogy should have taken place over ten-year project at least, during which time performance-related accountability measures could have been withdrawn. Also during this time, Estyn could have been given increased powers to inspect schools more often to ensure young people were still receiving an excellent education, enabling them to grow and ensure they were being cared for appropriately.
The second thing that made me wonder if we will ever change was the comment relating to the poorest being left worse off. What do we think has been happening in schools for the last 100 or so years? Those from wealthier backgrounds are still outperforming those from deprived backgrounds by far. Why is there a need to change our curriculum in a world where inequality is our biggest issue? It is simply because the more traditional curriculum (as seen in England – thank you, Michael Gove) and the assessment of that curriculum is not fit for purpose if that purpose is to enable all young people to grow up and flourish in life.
The procurement of knowledge and the assessment of this through nationally measured (Still middle-class biased) exams may give some young people from deprived backgrounds a ‘passport’ to their future, but unfortunately, it has never, since state schools first came into being, given the majority of these young people the confidence, aspiration and motivation, to use this passport effectively.
I know this comes over as idealistic, but the stark reality is that we don’t seem to have the deep desire to bring about the change required. Why is this?
The Trouble With Schools 