Embrace these vital education reforms

AS TEENAGERS across Wales open their A-level results today with varying degrees of excitement and fear they and their parents may be wondering what the future holds.

The world around today’s schoolleavers is an altogether more uncertain one economically, politically and socially than it was in the past.

There is no golden era, and it can be counterproductive to look back rather than forward, but it can also help show where things have gone wrong and where we can attempt to put them right.

Young people themselves seem to have taken the bull by the horns in demanding the older generation takes responsibility and action for the climate change crisis.

That will be a legacy this generation will have to get to grips with.

They have also been gifted an unstable and uncertain political climate where old alliances are rupturing and new ones must be forged.

Building alliances in a world where social media is one of the main means of communication may be made harder and easier at the same time.

This generation has only really known a world where social media existed and have grown up having to learn to navigate it. It is hoped that the entrenched positions social media encourages may be altered by them.

It is only when we learn to be ambivalent and look at both sides of an argument that we can try to begin to see things from another point of view and try to reach compromise and understanding.

Those coming up behind them in Wales’ schools may have a very different education, although they face the same challenges.

The long-awaited new curriculum being rolled out in schools from 2022 will replace what the Welsh Government describes as the current “prescriptive, narrow and outdated curriculum introduced in 1988”.

It is all too easy to want the same education for the next generation and to feel fearful of change, but any opportunities from these reforms must be seized with both hands.

There can be no doubt about it, in a rapidly moving world we cannot allow our curriculum to remain preserved in aspic.

As those getting their results today will know only too well as they yearn to move on and upwards.