Victorian values for the future of Welsh education
Education Secretary Kirsty Williams, who is due to speak at Cardiff Metropolitan University on the new curriculum, outlines her radical vision for education in Wales
“We ought to have a common purpose… in regard to education, the case of Wales is so special”
These are words that could have come from our National Mission for Education. I’ve often talked of our reforms being a collective and common endeavour. It’s the only way that we will deliver real change, raising standards and extending opportunities for all.
However, that quote is not by me. Those are the words of Liberal MP for Montgomeryshire Stuart Rendel, in the House of Commons in 1889.
He was introducing what became the first piece of dedicated Welsh legislation to support public education.
Our National Mission for Education and introduction of a new curriculum are also significant moments in our history as a people who believe in education as an individual, community and national endeavour.
We are not tinkering at the edges. For the first time ever, we are bringing forward our own ‘made in Wales’ legislative proposals for the school curriculum. It has been a long journey from 1889 to 2019.
Stuart Rendel was a great friend and ally of Gladstone. In fact, on that day in the Commons, Gladstone spoke from the Opposition benches in favour of the Bill. He recognised that Westminster had failed Wales by not legislating for Welsh-specific issues in over two centuries. He commented that “Wales has not pushed her claims with as much energy as she might have been justified in using”.
Now, of course, we have our own democratic parliament and government, working with our education profession to deliver the best possible education system. As I said last week in introducing our Curriculum and Assessment White Paper, this is the realisation of the call made in the 19th century by the great progressive educationalist Elizabeth Phillips Hughes. She was the first principal of the Cambridge Teacher College for Women and returned home to be the only woman on the committee which drafted the charter of the University of Wales.
In arguing for co-education, the promotion of women’s education and the importance of a Welsh dimension to our education system, she said that “education must be national, and must be in our own hands”. We are now moving forward on that promise.
In delivering on a new curriculum, and new purposes for our education system, I’m often asked why – and why now? In fact, pupils from Ysgol Calon y Cymoedd in Pontycymmer asked me these very questions during my #AskKirsty Twitter Q&A last week. To me, it’s pretty simple.
The essential features of the current curriculum, devised in 1988 by the then Westminster Government, are out of step with recent and future shifts in technology and social and economic developments. It’s so old, even I was still in school. It was before Google and before the Berlin Wall came down.
The high degree of prescription in the national curriculum has tended to create a culture where creativity has been curtailed. There has been a narrowing of teaching and learning, with the professional contribution of the workforce underdeveloped.
But let me be clear. I have no time for anyone proposing that a reformed curriculum is only about skills for the future economy and profession. Our new curriculum will support young people to develop higher standards of literacy and numeracy, become more digitally and bilingually competent, and evolve into enterprising, creative and critical thinkers.
It will help to develop our young people as confident, capable and caring citizens of Wales and the world.
As Graham Donaldson has said, it’s not a matter of skills versus knowledge. It’s about empowering teachers to guide pupils to become those confident citizens, while also acquiring connected, coherent and fundamental knowledge.
I want our youngest citizens not only to understand the world around them, but to question the world around them and change it for the better.
This is an exciting time for education in Wales. Not only are we developing a curriculum that ensures our learners are equipped to meet the needs of the future, but we are also developing a curriculum through genuine collaboration with our schools and key stakeholders.
The White Paper is now out for consultation and the content and detail of the new curriculum will be published in draft in April. Both are historic opportunities to shape the future of our new curriculum. That’s why I am asking people across Wales to contribute to this debate over the coming weeks and months.