March 2021

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Health and well-being is always important, but never more so than during the current challenges we face as professionals. We have pupil groups and staff members away from school with symptoms of Covid or self-isolating, and an expectation to adjust to ever-changing climates. So well-being has to be our paramount priority for staff, learners and our communities.

In our case, like many of the experiences of schools across Wales. We have had to navigate our way through three pupil group class closures, engaging with distance learning and a high proportion of our core members of staff away from school due to the variety of challenges that accompany responses to Covid. It’s a recognised challenge for the whole profession at this time.

The ‘good news’ part of this story is that we have been able to continue our focus and draw upon our engagement in developing Health and Well-being as one of the Areas of Learning and Experience. This has been a sustained, collectively recognised priority for our school and we have continued to embed new practices through exploring the new curriculum during this time. Well-being has been the driver in this provision with the accompanying AoLE supporting our aim with a firm focus on the cross-curricular skills.

For us, the momentum to embed a rich well-being provision grew in 2018. We established a professional learning community (I’ll call it the PLC from here on) including volunteers from members of the school community at various levels.

Why is Well-being so important at St Illtyd’s Primary?

From our robust needs analysis, our learners were deemed to be lacking in resilience, motivation and effort – linked to interruptions in their well-being.  How do we know? Our robust evaluation and knowledge of our learners and their context, told us we needed to work particularly hard to develop a good sense of well-being in all our children. Drawing on this local knowledge and relational information, the aims and vision for the PLC were captured in a collaboratively-shaped vision statement (see later), for enhancing the well-being for the community at St Illtyd’s Primary. We used this information to form a learner based profile known as the ‘Well-being Web’, explained later in this post.

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Education Minister Kirsty Williams will not be standing for re-election to the Senedd in May. Her passionate message to all practitioners encourages bold adoption of the new curriculum.

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The Curriculum and Assessment (Wales) Bill has completed its final stage in the Senedd before being passed into law. Following Royal Assent, anticipated in April, the Bill will become the Curriculum and Assessment (Wales) Act 2021.

The Curriculum for Wales is due to be introduced from September 2022. 

Last year, the Minister published an updated action plan setting out the next steps in Wales’ reform journey, ahead of the introduction of the new Curriculum for Wales.

Alongside the updated Our National Mission action plan, the Welsh Government also published a document setting out shared expectations of what curriculum realisation means for practitioners and schools from 2022. Curriculum for Wales: the journey to 2022 has been created to help schools prepare for designing and implementing their curriculum.  In January, the Welsh Government published the Curriculum Implementation Plan which will steer our work with partners to deliver the Curriculum for Wales. 

The passage of the bill means that schools and teachers can now grasp the opportunity to design their own curricula to support their learners’ own development and learning journeys, working with parents and communities, within a nationally consistent framework. 

Parallel reforms to support introduction have also continued, notwithstanding the COVID-19 pandemic. New ‘Accountability, Evaluation and Improvement’ guidance is under consultation, and professional learning to support development of school-level curriculum continues apace with Consortia-led learning and useful interactive on-line sessions and resources:

Schools as learning organisations – Hwb (gov.wales)

National professional enquiry project – Hwb (gov.wales)

National pedagogy project – Hwb (gov.wales)

Georgina Haarhoff,

Deputy Director, Curriculum, Welsh Government.

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This Spring, the first ‘national conversation’ of its kind will see practitioners discuss lessons learned during the pandemic; how to support learning in the next phase; and how to ensure their learners progress. Experiences will be shared, and findings will help to inform national policy.

Short films to spark the conversations will feature leading academics Robin Bannerjee, Graham Donaldson, and Louise Hayward, along with Mike Griffiths, a former practitioner deeply involved in the development of the Curriculum for Wales.

The potential and opportunities offered by the new curriculum to inform approaches to teaching and learning in the next phase will be a sub-theme throughout.

A representative from every school and setting will be able to attend. That person does not need to be a senior leader, but will be capable of instigating similar conversations back at their school, and feeding back from the event. Booking is via Regional Consortia, which will fund each participant for 2.5 hours for attendance, and importantly to share the learning with colleagues in school.

Inevitably held online, practitioners will join virtual discussion groups – bringing together ideas and perspectives in sessions led by fellow practitioners.

These ‘national conversations’ will also be a useful test-bed for work to develop a national network of practitioners and stakeholders to take curriculum realisation forward. The sessions will give useful insight into the reach and accessibility that virtual events can offer, and how a “hybrid” model of face-to-face and virtual events could provide a template for a national network.

An extract below from the facilitator briefing on the ‘conversations’ provides more insight into what these events hope to achieve: