The
Curriculum for Wales, Welsh History and Citizenship, and the Threat
of Embedding Inequality
By Martin Johnes, Hanes
Cymru - June 3, 2020
Welsh education is heading towards its biggest shake
up for two
generations. The new Curriculum for Wales is intended to place responsibility for what pupils are
taught with their teachers. It does not specify any required
content but instead sets out ‘the
essence of learning’ that should underpin
the topics taught and learning activities employed. At secondary school, many traditional
subjects will be merged into new
broad areas of learning. The curriculum is intended to produce ‘ambitious and capable learners’ who are
‘enterprising and creative’,
‘ethical and informed citizens’, and ‘healthy and confident’.
Given how radical this change potentially is, there has been
very little public debate about
it. This is partly rooted in how
abstract and difficult to understand the curriculum documentation is. It is dominated
by technical language and abstract ideas and there is very little
concrete to debate. There also seems
to be a belief that in science and maths very little
will change because of how those subjects are based on
unavoidable core knowledges. Instead, most of the public discussion that has occurred
has centred on the position of Welsh history.
The focus on history is rooted
in how obsessed
much of the Welsh public sphere (including myself) is by questions of identity. History is central to why Wales is a nation and thus has long been promoted by those seeking is develop a Welsh sense of nationhood. Concerns that
children are not taught enough Welsh history are longstanding
and date back to at least the 1880s. The debates
around the teaching of
Welsh history are also inherently political. Those who believe in
independence often feel their political
cause is hamstrung by people being unaware
of their own history.
The new curriculum
is consciously intended to
be ‘Welsh’ in outlook and
it requires the Welsh context
to be central to whatever subject matter is delivered. This matters most in the Humanities where the Welsh context is intended to be delivered through activities and topics that join together
the local, national and global. The intention is that
this will instil in them
‘passion and pride in themselves, their communities and their country’. This quote comes
from a guidance document for schools
and might alarm those who fear
a government attempt at
Welsh nation building. Other documents are less celebratory
but still clearly Welsh in outlook. Thus the goal stated in the main documentation is that learners should ‘develop a strong sense of their own identity and well-being’, ‘an understanding
of others’ identities and make connections with people, places
and histories elsewhere in Wales and across the world.’
A nearby slate
quarry could thus be used to teach about
local Welsh-speaking culture, the Welsh and British industrial
revolution, and the connections
between the profits of the slave trade and the historical local economy. This could
bring in not just history, but
literature, art, geography and economics too. There is real potential for exciting
programmes of study that break down subject boundaries and engage pupils with
where they live and make them
think and understand their community’s connections with Wales and the wider world.
This
is all sensible but there remains a vagueness around the underlying concepts. The Humanities section of the curriculum speaks of the need for ‘consistent
exposure to the story of learners’ locality and the story of Wales’. Schools are asked to ‘Explore
Welsh businesses, cultures,
history, geography, politics, religions and societies’. But this leaves considerable
freedom over the balance of focus and what exactly ‘consistent
exposure’ means in practice. If schools want to minimize the Welsh angle in favour of the British or the global, they will
be able to do so as long as
the Welsh context is there.
It is not difficult to imagine
some schools treating ‘the story of Wales’ as
a secondary concern because that is what already sometimes
happens.
The existing national curriculum requires local and Welsh history to be ‘a focus of the study’ but, like
its forthcoming replacement, it never defines very closely
what that means in terms
of actual practice. In some schools,
it seems that the Welsh perspective is reduced to a tick box exercise
where Welsh examples are occasionally employed but never
made the heart of the history programme. I say ‘seems’ because
there is no data on the proportion of existing pre-GCSE history teaching that is devoted to Welsh history. But all the anecdotal evidence points to Wales often not being at the heart of what history is taught, at least in secondary schools.
At key stage 3 (ages 11 to 14) in particular, the Welsh element can
feel rather nominal as many children learn
about the Battle of Hastings, Henry VIII and the Nazis.
GCSEs were reformed in 2017 to ensure Welsh history is not marginalised but at A Level the options schools choose reveal a stark preference in some
units away from not just Wales but Britain too.
Why schools chose not to teach more Welsh history is a complex issue. Within a curriculum that is very flexible,
teachers deliver what they are
confident in, what they have
resources for, what interests them and what they
think pupils will be interested in. Not all history teachers have been
taught Welsh history at school or university and they thus perhaps prefer to lean towards those topics
they are familiar with. Resources are probably
an issue too. While there
are plenty of Welsh history resources out there, they
can be scattered around and
locating them is not always easy. Some
of the best date back to the 1980 and 90s and are
not online. There is also amongst both
pupils and teachers the
not-unreasonable idea that Welsh history is simply not as interesting as themes such as Nazi Germany. This
matters because, after key stage
3, different subjects are competing for
pupils and thus resources.
The new curriculum
does nothing to address any of these issues
and it is probable that it will not do much to enhance the volume of Welsh history taught beyond the local level. It replicates the existing curriculum’s flexibility with some loose requirement
for a Welsh focus. Within that flexibility,
teachers will continue to be guided by their existing knowledge, what resources they already have, what
topics and techniques they already know
work, and how much time and confidence
they have to make changes. Some
schools will update what they
do but in many there is a very real possibility that not much will
change at all, as teachers simply mould the tried and tested existing curricular into the new model. No change is always
the easiest policy outcome to follow. Those schools that
already teach a lot of
Welsh history will continue to do so. Many of those that
do not will also probably carry on in that
vein.
Of course, a system designed to allow different curricula is also designed to produce different outcomes. The whole point of the reform is for schools to be different to one another but there
may be unintended consequences to this. Particularly in areas where schools
are essentially in competition with each other
for pupils, some might choose
to develop a strong sense of Welshness across all subject areas because they
feel it will appeal to local parents and local authority funders. Others might go the opposite way for
the same reasons, especially in border areas where attracting
staff from England is important. Welsh-medium schools are probably
more likely to be in the former group and English-medium schools in the latter.
Moreover,
the concerns around variability do not just extend to issues of Welsh identity and history. By telling schools they can teach what they feel
matters, the Welsh Government
is telling them they do not have to teach, say, the histories of racism or the Holocaust. It is unlikely that any school
history department would choose not to teach what Hitler
inflicted upon the world but they
will be perfectly at liberty to do so; indeed, by enshrining their right to do this, the Welsh Government is saying it would be happy for any
school to follow such a line. Quite how that
fits with the government’s endorsement of Holocaust Memorial Day and Mark Drakeford’s reminder of the importance of remembering such genocides is unclear.
There are other policy
disconnects. The right to vote in Senedd elections has been
granted to sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds. Yet the government has decided against requiring them to be taught anything specific about that institution, its history and how Welsh democracy works. Instead, faith is placed in a vague requirement
for pupils to be made into informed
and ethical citizens.
By age 16, the ‘guidance’ says learners should
be able to ‘compare and evaluate local, national and global governance systems, including the systems of government and democracy in Wales, considering their impact on
societies in the past and present, and the rights and responsibilities of citizens in Wales.’ Making Wales an ‘including’ rather than the
main focus of this ‘progression step’ seems to me to downplay its importance. Moreover, what this sentence actually means in terms of class
time and knowledge is up to schools and teachers. Some pupils will be taught lots about
devolved politics, others little. The government is giving young people the responsibility of voting but avoiding its
own responsibility to ensure they are
taught in any depth what
that means in a Welsh context.
The new curriculum
will thus not educate everyone in the same elements of political citizenship or history because it is explicitly designed to not do so. Just as they
do now, pupils will continue to leave schools with
very different understandings of what Wales is, what the Senedd does and how both fit into British, European and global contexts. Perhaps that does not matter if we want pupils to make up their
own minds about how they
should be governed. But, at the very least, if we are
going to give young people the vote, surely it is not too much to want them to be told where it came from,
what it means, and what it can do.
But this is not the biggest missed opportunity of the curriculum. Wales already has an educational
system that produces very different outcomes for those
who go through it. In 2019, 28.4% of pupils eligible for free
school meals achieved five A*-C grade GCSEs, compared
with 60.5% of those not eligible. In 2018, 75.3% of
pupils in Ceredigion hit this level,
whereas in Blaenau Gwent only 56.7% did. These are staggering differences that have nothing to do with the curriculum and everything to do with how poverty impacts
on pupils’ lives. There is nothing in the new curriculum that looks to eradicate
such differences.
Teachers in areas with
the highest levels of deprivation face a daily struggle to deal with its
consequences. This will also impact
on what the new curriculum can achieve in their
schools. It will be easier to develop innovative programmes that take advantage
of what the new curriculum can enable in schools where
teachers are not dealing with the extra demands of pupils who have
missed breakfast or who have difficult
home lives. Fieldtrips are easiest in schools
where parents can afford them. Home
learning is most effective in homes with
books, computers and internet access. The very real danger of the new curriculum is not what it will or will not do for Welsh citizenship and history but that it will
exacerbate the already significant difference between schools in affluent areas
and schools that are not. Wales needs less difference between its schools,
not more.
Martin Johnes is Professor of History at Swansea University.
This essay was first published in the Welsh Agenda (2020).