Welcome to the Partneriaeth Curriculum for Wales website.
This site has been produced to provide schools with support in curriculum design and pedagogical development. It supersedes previous websites and pulls all the relevant and up to date resources into one easily accessible area. Whilst the website is public facing, please note that you will have to be logged in to Hwb via a Partneriath School Hwb account to access resources. The site is designed to complement the training and workshops provided by the curriculum team and will continuously evolve in line with future curriculum and pedagogical development.
Please contact us if you would like more information on these programmes, need support for your school or would like to suggest additions to the site.
Curriculum Design
In order to support schools as they embark on developing and refining their curricula the Partneriaeth curriculum team has developed a five step cyclical model that can be used as a reference guide. It is important to remind ourselves at this point that this is not a national curriculum in the sense that a ready-made prescriptive curriculum will be provided at some point. Curriculum for Wales is to be regarded as a framework which outlines the expectations for all schools and settings in Wales, and which gives you as practitioners, the autonomy and agency to design a curriculum which will be unique to your learners.
Current guidance talks of building a nation of curriculum designers and, daunting as this may seem, it is true that you will all lead this change within your role in your school. Such a large undertaking is easier to deal with if it is broken down into smaller, manageable steps. Hence the stepped, cyclical nature of our model which you may use wholly or selectively in your own designs. The way you go about it is as important as what you will produce, and therefore collaboration with others every step of the way will be essential.
We are suggesting this approach, as one possible route from vision to classroom:
Deciding together what you want for your learners.
Once you have agreed on what you want for your learners, the next step would be to decide what you want them to learn.
Once the learning has been identified, have discussions on what progression looks like in that learning.
Decide where the best place for this learning to happen is.
The final step is selecting contexts for the learning and then you will hopefully, have a curriculum in place that realises your school's vision.
All workshops and guidance pertinent to each of these sections can be accessed via the drop-down menu above or by clicking on the relevant section of the graphic.
High Quality Teaching and Evaluation
In designing your curriculum, schools should consider the pedagogical approaches they will need to employ to support learners in realising the four purposes. Schools should seek to develop a strong vision of learning and teaching which considers the ‘why’ and ‘how’ as well as the ‘what’. This means that you are searching for the essence of learning in your classrooms - this is partly about content essentials (knowledge you have to teach) but mostly it is about the process and application of learning (how you teach and why learners need to understand this knowledge), all the time reflecting and progressing learners towards the four purposes.
Support for this pedagogical development can be found in the Teaching / Evaluation section of the site.
Curriculum for Wales Model
This section contains three introductory videos, each with an associated transcript, that support practitioners to develop an understanding of the conceptual model of the curriculum. These curriculum models are followed by a set of four whole-school workshops which enable schools and settings to develop or update their vision with local stakeholders, to consider collaboration and to evaluate their pedagogy and assessment practice in relation to their whole-school development needs.
If you are just beginning your curriculum reform journey, we would suggest that this section be used to refresh / gain an understanding as to how Curriculum for Wales differs from previous iterations.