Curriculum for Wales

Progression in Health and Well-being

'…progression must be embedded in learning and teaching and should form the basis of thinking in schools when designing and planning the school curriculum.'

Curriculum for Wales places the learner at the heart of curriculum design. This quote from the guidance emphasises the importance of understanding how learners progress and how this understanding will provide the starting point as schools design a curriculum for their learners. In order to support learners to progress along the learning continuum, practitioners need to develop a shared understanding of progression.

This workshop will address the four questions below, which come directly from the 'Supporting learner progression' guidance and which have been set by Welsh Government to guide you as you design your school curriculum:

What is progression?
What is a shared understanding of progression?
Why is a shared understanding of progression important?
How should schools and settings develop this shared understanding?

Curriculum for Wales requires an understanding of progression in learning before moving on to discussions on how the learning will be assessed.

What is progression?

Response and reflection

As a team, school, or within a cluster, think about how you might define progression for :

Your learners
Your curriculum design

Also consider in what ways you would want to see learners make progress. Here are a few thoughts which have been previously shared by practitioners:

Progression may be defined as:

Moving forward
Improving
Gaining depth and breadth in learning
Increasing sophistication
Transferring and applying

Now that we have shared thoughts on what is meant by progression, it's important to agree on what we want our learners to make progress in within Health and Well-being.

If we want our learners to access a range of support to manage their mental and emotional well-being, that is increasing what they know, and that is knowledge. If we want them to become aware of how self-image impacts on mental health and well-being, that would mean showing progress in their understanding. If we want them to improve the way they communicate how they are feeling and ask for help when needed, that would involve improving what they can do, which means making progress in skills.

You can clearly see these ideas reflected in the definition of progression as provide in the CfW guidance. Therefore, when planning for learning you will need to support your learners to increase their knowledge, to deepen understanding and to improve their skills, but also support them to develop their capacities, attributes and dispositions.

Learners will therefore make progress in:

knowledge
understanding
skills
capacities
attributes and dispositions

'Progression in learning is a process of developing and improving in skills, knowledge and understanding over time. This focuses on understanding what it means to make progress in a given area or discipline as learners increase the depth, breadth and sophistication of their knowledge and understanding, skills and capacities, and attributes and dispositions.'

Supporting learner progression: assessment guidance

Curriculum for Wales

What is a ‘shared understanding of progression’?

Developing a shared understanding of progression means that practitioners, collectively within your school or setting, across your cluster, and with other schools beyond your cluster together explore, discuss and understand:

your joint expectations for how learners should progress and how knowledge, skills and experiences should contribute to this in schools’ and settings’ curricula
how to ensure coherent progression for learners throughout their learning journey and in particular at points of transition
how your expectations for progression compare to those of other schools and settings.

Why is a ‘shared understanding of progression’ important?

Practitioners understanding the progress they want learners to make throughout their education, and how to put this into practice in a coherent way across your school and cluster, is vital to ensure:

Coherence: Curriculum for Wales provides schools and settings with flexibility within a national framework. Coherence ensures learners’ experiences are joined-up, authentic and relevant and also helps identify how to sequence learning effectively.

Smooth transitions: to ensure the best possible transitions within and between settings and primary schools and primary and secondary school for learners. Schools and settings should understand what and how learners have been learning, what and how they will be learning and what their next steps in learning should be to support their education and well-being.

Pace and challenge of expectations: A shared understanding of progression is vital to ensure that the pace and challenge of expectations – for all learners are sufficiently challenging and realistic.

What is the role of the statements of what matters, the principles of progression and the descriptions of learning?

‘The statements of what matters, principles of progression and the descriptions of learning articulate the essence of what should underpin learning and provide the same high expectations for all learners.’

Curriculum for Wales

All three underpin learning and provide the same high expectations for all learners across Wales.

When designing your curriculum, they should be used in the following order, as they appear in the guidance:

statements of what matters (mandatory)
principles of progression (mandatory)
descriptions of learning (not mandatory)

When we decide what our learners need to learn, we go to the statements of what matters. They are mandatory and encapsulate the learning required to realise the four purposes.

When we want to understand progression in this learning , we go to the principles of progression.

The descriptions of learning serve as signposts to show how learners should progress in different threads of learning within each statements of what matters.

Where do we start to develop the shared understanding of progression?

In order to develop a shared understanding of progression in learning, we need to start with the Principles of Progression.

The Principles of Progression

The principles of progression provide a mandatory requirement of what progression must look like for learners.

They are designed to be used by practitioners to:

understand what progression means and should look like in each Area
develop the curriculum and learning experiences to enable learners to progress in the ways described
develop assessment approaches which seek to understand whether this progress is being made.

Looking at these statements more closely it may be beneficial to simplify the language and reflect on their meaning. The column on the right-hand side is one interpretation of the principles that you may find helpful when engaging in professional dialogue across and between schools, which will help to secure a common understanding and common language around progression.

This simplification of the language may help us engage with and find greater clarity in these principles of progression.

Developing a shared understanding of progression

Each principle of progression is supported with a rationale, which further explains what progression means in this Area. These cover the whole continuum across 3-16. Here is where we can find what progression means to the Area as a whole. As you read through each Principle of Progression in turn you may start to pick out key phrases and language that helps to identify what progression in learning may look like. Highlighting or underlining key phrases in each of the principles, in teams or in clusters, will help to start the process of developing a shared understanding of progression.

Click on the drop-down bar to see the narrative for each principle in Health and Well-being.

Increasing effectiveness as a learner - Effectiveness

Learners progress by developing their independence and agency in matters relating to health and well-being: resulting in a growing responsibility for their own health and well-being. Support from peers and supporting adults is an important enabler of progress and as learners progress in an aspect of well-being, progression includes developing the capacity to recognise when help is needed, and where and how to seek that support. Increasing effectiveness also means increasing self-regulation: recognising their feelings and adopting strategies to respond to these in a healthy way. As learners develop progression in effectiveness will include a developing ability to make, justify and evaluate decisions across the range of statements of what matters.

Increasing breadth and depth of knowledge - Knowledge

Progression will mean learners developing an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the fundamental concepts outlined in the statements of what matters and of a range of aspects, topics and issues relating to their health and well-being and that of others. Progression will require learners to revisit aspects, topics and issues, developing knowledge at a deeper level. Learners’ knowledge of these aspects also progresses from the concrete to the abstract: understanding consequences, implications and underlying principles. This progression supports learners to develop conceptual knowledge and critical understanding in a range of aspects of health and well-being and personal behaviour.

Deepening understanding of the ideas and disciplines within Areas - Understanding

As learners progress, they develop an appreciation of the significance of a range of aspects of their health and well-being that are contained within the statements of what matters and what can influence these aspects. Viewing different aspects and topics related to health and well-being through the lens of different statements of what matters. As such, progression means learners developing an increasing understanding of how the statements of what matters interlink and being able to apply these in exploring and understanding a variety of topics and issues.

Refinement and growing sophistication in the use and application of skills - Skills

Progression means learners developing their confidence, motivation competence in a skill, developing increasing accuracy and proficiency. Progression in health and well-being occurs across a wide range of skills, including: physical, emotional, psychological and social skills. This will also include more practical skills that also support learners in their health and well-being. The development of many skills will rely, to some extent on learners’ wider developmental milestones. This is reflected in descriptions of learning: earlier progression focuses on learners developing awareness of a range of skills and later progression supports increasing accuracy, complexity and proficiency in those skills.

Making connections and transferring learning into new contexts - Application

As learners progress, they develop connections between aspects of health and well-being and a wide range of topics and issues. This is underpinned by a deepening understanding of the statements of what matters, recognising the underlying common themes and principles between different issues, both within the Area and within learning in other Areas. As learners progress, the variety, complexity and nuance of the contexts they consider increases, in line with their needs, experiences and wider development. Across the continuum of learning, a critical step for learners in health and well-being is transferring understanding from their own well-being to that of others; becoming more socially responsible. Progression means learners developing an appreciation and regard for the needs of others and the impact of decisions, actions and circumstances on them. The development of empathy, care and respect for others is critical to this. As learners become more socially responsible, they progress from primarily considering themselves, to considering others, both in their own relationships with others and in wider local, national and international contexts, developing the capacity of advocacy on behalf of themselves and of others.

Response and reflection

Read and discuss the narrative for each principle of progression in Health and Well-being.

Summarise each paragraph into bullet points.

Here is one possible example.

How should schools and settings develop a shared understanding of progression?

Within all schools and settings.
Within each cluster – to support coherence of approaches to progression between primary schools, between primary and secondary schools and around points of transition.
Where possible involving other schools or settings beyond the cluster. Secondary schools in particular should participate in professional dialogue with other secondary schools to support collaboration and coherence across secondary providers.
Between schools and settings, involving school collaboration with funded non-maintained settings, PRUs and other EOTAS providers with whom they have relationships.

Selecting learning from the statements of what matters

'In Curriculum for Wales, the principles of progression and the statements of what matters, which form the mandatory basis for progression, must directly inform planning for progression.'

Curriculum For Wales (Priorities for Curriculum development and learning)

In our last workshop, we suggested that you undertake an activity to select learning from the statements of what matters. The example below shows how one group of practitioners selected the learning from the statement Developing physical health and well-being has lifelong benefits. For the purpose of the activity, we will take the learning from health-promoting behaviours.

Learners should make progress, in alignment with the Principles of Progression in the concepts and learning that are embedded within the statements of what matters.

Discussions may look like this example.

Using the principles of progression to understand progress in that selected learning

Here we can see that Interconnections, Choices and Enquiry have been identified as a focus for learning in health-promoting behaviours. Following the identification of the learning that is going to be the focus, discussions can then take place to identify from the principles of progression the aspects that relate to this learning.

This example shows some of the possible responses that may come from further discussions surrounding progression based on the learning taken directly from the statements of what matters about what would that learning look like in a more practical way for a learner who was early on on the learning continuum and how would that progress.

Your discussions will undoubtedly develop a more detailed response as you use your professionalism and understanding of learners at different points along the 3 - 16 continuum. However, what this activity does is provide a clear focus on the mandatory principles of progression as a starting point for discussions on how a learner makes progress within Health and Well-being.

Response and reflection

Use the Principles of Progression table above in this reflection.
Consider a 'thread' of learning that you have identified from the statements of what matters for Health and Well-being. A 'thread' of learning is the learning that you have selected from the statements of what matters that will run through the 3-16 continuum of learning.
Next consider the principles of progression that may be observed through this learning.
Finally, working in teams or within a cluster, discuss how the learners might be progress in that learning with a focus on the identified principle. Record your discussions in a table such as the one below.

How the descriptions of learning can help us to understand progression in learning

Although the descriptions of learning are not mandatory, they are there to support us to plan for progression in different threads of learning within each statement of what matters. Below you can see the descriptions for progression in the selected learning: health-promoting behaviours.

We must remember that the descriptions of learning should not be used as a starting point for curriculum design, neither should they be treated as boxes to tick. They are rather points of reference or signposts to help us as practitioners support our learners to move along the learning continuum.

How can we share our understanding of progression?

You may want to consider how you will capture this progression in order to be able to share it with others within your school and cluster.

The image below could be one way to represent this progression. As an example, we have taken a thread of learning from another statement of what matters, Healthy relationships are fundamental to our well-being. The learners are required to understand that feelings of belonging and connection that come from healthy relationships have a powerful effect on health well-being.

Starting with early learning, the learner may start to describe how family, friends and school community can make them feel. Progress in this learning could involve identifying how to make connections with all types of people and recognising how relationships evolve and change throughout life, possibly looking at the peer to peer relationships in the teenage years. Further progress in this learning could include the ability to develop and understand the importance of the components of a healthy relationship.

In this example, we have selected a circle which has allowed us to show how learning in one thread builds in layers over time, becoming broader, deeper and more sophisticated. We have also made reference to how the principles of progression could apply here. This is an example and not an exhaustive list.

Next steps

Reflect on your understanding of progression and how it is articulated in your curriculum.
Identify threads of learning and consider progression along those threads.
Work with practitioners in your school, cluster, and where possible other similar schools, to develop a shared understanding of progression.
Think about how this shared understanding might be captured and shared with others

Here's a video that consolidates this page that you may want to use for training purposes.

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