 I have been very privileged for now 15 years to follow a bold development in Scotland which is the curriculum for excellence. I've sometimes been characterised as a critic of the new curriculum in Scotland. I'm not. I have at times been critical of the way in which it's been implemented. I'm equally honoured, in fact I feel very privileged indeed, to be part as a participant now in the development of a bold new experiment in Wales and I think that the new curriculum in Wales offers enormous possibilities as well as, of course, considerable challenges. So I'm going to just start off by reflecting a little bit on what curriculum is because I think it's important that as a teaching profession in Wales that we start to think differently about the curriculum if we're going to make the most of it. One of the challenges in Scotland has been moving from, in the words of Andrew Schleicher of the OECD, an intended curriculum which has been praised, has been bold and visionary to an enacted or an implemented curriculum and a lot of the problems in Scotland and I have been quite a few have laid not in the curriculum itself but actually in the systemic issues around accountability for example which you've got in the way of teacher agency and which have prevented many schools from taking the bold steps I think that they should have done and I'm very heartened in Wales, delighted in fact to see that there are explicit moves to connect teacher development with curriculum development and also attention to support mechanisms, the infrastructure that's needed to develop the curriculum and it always reminds me of the words of Lawrence Stenhouse, a great curriculum scholar writing 50 or so years ago who said that there is no curriculum development without teacher development so we need to bear those wise words in mind. Okay I'm going to start off with an opening gambit here which sounds like a bit of a truism and that is that curriculum is or should be at the heart of education and I think that's a message that's been lost in recent years. It is intriguing to say the least to find that there is only one masters course available in the UK which is explicitly about curriculum it's at the Institute of Education in London and it mainly attracts overseas students. When I did my master's degree in education 25 years ago I did a degree in curriculum studies at the University of Leeds and just about every university in the UK which had an education department at that stage was running courses in curriculum studies so something's happened in the meantime perhaps part of the problem has been the teacher proof curriculum presented out of London as a national curriculum which of course Wales has been subject to for a long time now and I do detect when I talked to Welsh teachers a sense of relief that perhaps those shackles have been thrown off and that the new curriculum is offering I think exciting new possibilities here. It does however offer some challenges as I've said curriculum for Wales is different it requires different thinking and potentially although not necessarily different practices I'm not an advocate of change for change's sake what I'm saying is though that we need to engage with a different way of thinking about curriculum which may result in different practices or it may result in the reinforcement of what we do but we don't know that unless we engage properly. It requires I think a clear sense of what the purposes of education are and those are pretty clearly laid out in the four purposes and I'm not necessarily talking about the slogans the top level ideas they're useful I'm talking about the underpinning statements that go with that one of the the issues in Scotland is that people are able to repeat back to you the four capacities of curriculum for excellence but they're not necessarily able to understand or talk about the the underlying attributes and capabilities which form those four capacities so there is a process here that needs to be engaged with which I'll talk a little bit about this morning and a lot of that is to do with sense making sense making has to be a really vital part of any curriculum development as a starting point almost where we start with purposes and think about what they mean and what the implications of those are and I think it's no surprise that Finland which has a reputation for successful curriculum development is successful not because they have better policies than Wales or Scotland but because their processes are absolutely spot on when it comes to engaging the profession with their new curriculum I've had the joy of working with some Finnish researchers recently and they've talked a lot about the sense making that goes on as the Finnish curriculum is enacted from policy to practice. There is an underlying message here which is that this requires very active engagement by the teaching profession this is not a case of simply carrying out instructions in a teacher proof curriculum this is about developing practices and I'm going to introduce two concepts today one of them is the concept of curriculum making as opposed to curriculum implementation and the other one is about curriculum as social practice and I'll come back to both of those. Why do we need this? Well the answer for me lies in the famous parable the curriculum parable of the saber tooth curriculum this was written in the 1930s it's as true today as it was then the notion that the school curriculum can become set in stone in this particular case the stone age curriculum there were three subjects one of which was saber tooth tiger scaring a practical subject actually has some social utility at the time when saber tooth tigers were eating villages it became obsolete of course when the saber tooth tiger became extinct but did the curriculum change? No education is timeless and the curriculum is not very good at keeping up so there's there's some powerful messages in there about how we need to react to the very rapid social changes technological changes that are affecting society and how the curriculum is going to be fit for purpose to do that so the idea of 21st century skills comes out of organisations like the OECDs and it's often adopted fairly unproblematically and I think often we can even fall into the trap of saying that education is about skills now and it's about nothing else and I would argue very strongly against that we also need 21st century knowledge young people need to have the forms of knowledge and I'm not talking about the traditional knowledge rich curriculum that's coming out of some quarters in England at the moment but I'm talking about a curriculum that's knowledge rich in it it provides young people with the effectively with the powerful knowledge they need in order to navigate society successfully to become critically engaged effective citizens okay another bear trap we can fall into here is by thinking then what subjects do we need to teach to do that and I would suggest that's the wrong question subjects are a useful mechanism as the sabre tooth tiger scaring subject was a useful mechanism they can become obsolete they can be gaps in subject coverage and really what we should be doing is asking the question what knowledge does an educated young person need in order to become this effective member of a complex democratic society and that might mean that we need to rethink the way we do subjects it may mean that the traditional subjects no longer do it for us it may mean that there are other ways besides separate subjects into disciplinary approaches for example which do that but I wouldn't discount subjects at the same time you may ask who is this bloke who's speaking to you I'm going to say a little bit more I was asked when I put this together to say a little bit about myself I am fundamentally a teacher I was a history teacher in England for a number of years I taught in New Zealand I got into academia through teacher education I was in charge of the history initial teacher education strand at Sterling University for about 10 years but really my passion has been curriculum studies which Michael Apple the famous American scholar called a lost art and my my big mission in life I suppose is to put curriculum back into the conversation the sterling network for curriculum studies is about raising the standard of conversation professional dialogue discourse around curricular issues because curriculum is so essential to framing and developing good educational practice so in Scotland we've done a number of projects one of the projects we did was accompanied by a paper which was published which has been widely read called curriculum for excellence a brilliant idea but and it would be good to know that in Wales in five or 10 years time somebody isn't writing a similar paper saying a curriculum for Wales a brilliant idea but I think we can learn from Scotland's experiences Scotland has done some really good stuff but it's also I think made some mistakes and I'll come on to to some of the areas where I think we can learn from Scotland one of the areas we have been working in in recent years is around critical collaborative professional inquiry and this is a systematic approach to doing action research based curriculum development in schools and some colleagues in EAS have already been exposed to this over the last year. I should add here that I'm also on YouTube. My last video on YouTube went viral with about 400 hits I think it was so YouTube is a good medium for getting academic work out there. I believe the average paper in an academic journal gets read by 10 people incidentally. Okay so my involvement in Wales has been as I said quite comprehensive so far. I had conversations with Graham Donaldson when he was writing the successful futures report. I was invited to be part of the curriculum and assessment board along with other curriculum specialists. I think that this group has been quite influential because it has helped address some of the big questions that started to emerge after the supplementation process and it's a critical friend for the Welsh Government. We certainly haven't been directing things but we've been offering advice sometimes critical sometimes encouraging and in doing so I think we've made a difference in some areas. I'll come back to one of those shortly. I've also more recently been supporting some of the AOLEs particularly the Humanities AOLE and some of you may have seen a paper that I produced over the summer which is listed here on the screen which is approaches to specifying curriculum areas of learning which was really picking up the notion that there has been a lot of evidence over the years to show that if you start to over specify an area of curriculum then we run into all sorts of problems primarily that teachers will take these and in a tick box very instrumental way and what we want is explicit and clear guidance that gives a starting point for development but without actually getting people just to say when we need to put that in and we need to put that in. The speaker earlier on mentioned the tendency to have email lessons. In Scotland we had curriculum for excellence lessons in some schools so Wednesday afternoon would be portioned off to talk about the outcomes of curriculum for excellence and for the rest of the week it was business as usual so you had wonderful things like the sausage themed afternoon where everything was about sausages and tried to tick off as many curriculum for excellence outcomes as possible that is a true story by the way at a high school in Edinburgh. I can just about manage to cope with the idea of boiling up sausages to check the fat content but when it comes to the history of the sausage or sausages of the world in geography that does start to stretch the imagination. Okay so we've also been working in Wales with EAS as I mentioned some work around curriculum development. Now I want to just say a few things about some of the emerging themes that are happening in Wales around the curriculum. The first one I think that is very distinctive is this what matters approach. It has become very fashionable in recent years to frame a national curriculum around ladders of learning outcomes and there's been a lot of critical literature about this particularly the way that it can atomise or fragment learning and lead to tick box approaches so I would really salute the what matters approach. It's providing a very very clear idea of what the curriculum is about in each learning area. I've put upon here this is the Gaelic version of the of a page from the experiences and outcomes in Scotland. There are now there are 1820 I think experiences and outcomes set out into five levels in Scotland and these have provided a very instrumental approach for schools and many schools have simply audited existing practice against these outcomes and then tweaked to where necessary and that for me is not in the spirit of the new curriculum. So this new what matters approach with its narratives of progression I think is a really helpful way forward. Another key thing here in Wales is that there has been an explicit attention focused on the purposes of education as the starting point for educational planning. So curriculum for Wales is explicitly a purposes led curriculum which raises questions then of if we're clear about purposes what are those fit for purpose practices which are going to lead to the curriculum being developed properly. A third area here and this I think is a bit of clarification is the idea of guiding principles which has come out to some of the discussions we've had. There was a tendency I think in the early days to think about the starting point not as the purposes but perhaps as the activity the pedagogies and so on and I think this is the wrong way to do it. So the guiding principles are basically saying yes we want people to develop in particular ways according to the four purposes the guiding principles on the other hand are about things that we should bear in mind not starting points. So we could have a guiding principle for example that all schools should have some learning which is dialogical because through dialogical learning young people get to express themselves and develop their understanding. So there's a clear distinction here I think and then something which I think is excellent in Wales and Scotland is now copying it is the regional consortia which provide an infrastructure potentially probably needs some development but an infrastructure for the sort of support that schools need to develop the curriculum in a not a standardised way but a way that's not going to lead to unacceptable variation across the system and there has been a sense in Scotland of schools each school inventing the wheel. Now John Swinney the Cabinet Secretary for Education in Scotland has recently launched out an initiative around I think it's seven regional collaborative six or seven regional collaboratives which are based on the Welsh model and their job is not to go out as the local authorities have with a stick and a cheque sheet of KPIs but actually to start to provide the leadership and the support for curriculum development across clusters of schools and I really salute that. So this I think is a fresh opportunity to reimagine schooling in Wales to re-envisage what schools are about and also to extend and develop the professionalism of teachers the agency of teachers but it does require I think a new openness to thinking which perhaps the national curriculum previously didn't require it requires a very critically engaged and knowledgeable workforce and it requires a willingness to by teachers to take the initiative to take control risks to be bold and to innovate and that's something that's going to be a significant culture change I think given 25 years of the national curriculum. What we don't want is what's in this cartoon here which for me is a very powerful image of curriculum change across the world in the last 100 years or so and the caption says it doesn't seem to fit very well. The other teachers say no matter the principle says we have no choice and for those of you who can't see from the back it's a picture of two teachers stuffing a turkey with a computer. Now what we do not want here is this notion that the curriculum is simply a product to be delivered uncritically by practitioners. There's a lot to be said for critical analysis of policy consideration of the implications of that policy for practice in other words teachers mediate policy and develop practices according to local needs as well. So how do we move beyond that how do we avoid the pitfalls some of the pitfalls that have come out in Scotland are and they've been well documented the downgrading of knowledge the fact that any old knowledge goes the sausage afternoon for example rather than thinking about the powerful knowledge young people need the tendency for the curriculum to become over specified which has been very well documented the instrumental box ticking that goes with that and the focus on product rather than process and of course the inevitable tendency which you'll be familiar with in Wales educational fans to flourish. I came across a a brain gym course in Scotland run by a local authority a few weeks ago which was quite horrifying. So we need to think about the big picture much more. This is a rock it's a rock actually in a place in north Wales or central Wales I'm not sure the exact place but the idea here is that we need to go beyond thinking about just our very particular bit of the curriculum to thinking more globally that's the big picture the rock is right down at the front. So how do we do that? Well one thing we can do is start thinking more holistically about the concept of curriculum. It is not I think as has become fashionable simply the content we teach the list of specifications are produced by the government or worse school in many secondary schools the subjects that populate the columns on the option choices. I think it has to be much more than that. It is clearly about content it is clearly about the knowledge and the skills that are developed through the curriculum but it's also about how we assess evaluate that that needs to be built in. It's also about pedagogy and I think there's a truism here that how we learn is as important as what we learn for developing intellectual capacity. You know I'm saying here that you know if we have a monologue of or a monochromatic view of curriculum which is just teachers talking or death by cooperative learning that's another fad I've seen recently then students will only learn particular things so a good educational programme needs to be pedagogically varied with the criterion of fitness for purpose that cooperative learning is good for some things teacher talk is good for other things. It could be as well that we need to think much more than we have done about the provision in the schools so a good example here is the timetable in the secondary school in Scotland the 52 minute period is pretty ubiquitous. What 52 minutes doesn't do is allow time to do things like fieldwork around the school or cooperative learning structures for example jigsawing is a very worthwhile activity that takes more than 52 minutes. So the way in which we organise the school day also has to be considered as part of the curriculum. We also need to think then of the curriculum not as the instructions for what we do but as the framework the resources and the ideas which frame our action and that's quite a different way of thinking and I think we also need to go beyond the delivery metaphor which has become very prevalent in recent years. Now I think back 25 years to a head teacher I work with in Leeds who said what is this nonsense about delivery? What are we? Milman or something? And yet that word delivery has become part of the public lexicon in education and elsewhere in the public services. How do we move beyond that? We need to stop thinking about product and start thinking about the processes and the outcomes that come from those processes. So a helpful way of thinking about curriculum here is to think about the different layers of curriculum making that take place across the system. The super level is about ideas from organisations like the OECD. The macro level is the curriculum for Wales documents. The meso level I think is tends to be has tended to be about challenge in Wales and elsewhere but it needs to be much more about support. It is what is that infrastructure that is happening across the country which is going to support the development of curriculum in schools and that could include the development of the sort of resources we heard about this morning. It could include the development of nationally validated programmes with resources for example integrated science and it could include leaders of professional learning working with teachers. That meso level stuff is absolutely vital. At the micro and the nano levels the classroom levels what we're talking about here is teachers making sense of and developing practices hence the word curriculum making as opposed to curriculum implementation. So these are about the social practices that take place at different levels of the system as the curriculum is formed as ideas and then translated by professional teachers using professional judgment into action. So we should be asking a number of questions here in schools as we start to approach curriculum for Wales. So the first question is where do we start and clearly for me the starting point is those curricular purposes set out at the top end of the curriculum for Wales itself the four purposes but also the AOLEs. What are the big ideas here? What are the purposes, principles and values underpin our practice? Have we taken time in school to make sense of those and to talk about the implications of them? We then need to ask what is the knowledge that young people need in order to achieve in order to go out as educated young people as educated citizens but also what are the appropriate methods and as I mentioned the way we learn is as powerful as what we learn in developing those capacities. But there are also school level systemic issues that need to be addressed and one of the things I'm advocating here is almost a system audit in school. Identification of the barriers against change and the catalyst for change in your school. A situational analysis. How do you go about doing that? What are you looking at? So for example things like the culture of the school is there a learning culture in your school? If not, how do you develop one? Should you be setting up reading groups to have a look at academic articles and blog posts which are relevant and having critical discussion about those? Do you have a culture where people are prepared to take risks or is it a very hierarchical culture where people keep their headstand? And that's been a particular problem in some Scottish schools I think. In terms of the structures are we doing the right things in terms of timetabling in terms of the roles in the school do we need to send people on courses to become more acclimatised to those roles? Do we have the communications channel set up? Some of the work we highlighted in our curriculum in our curriculum and agency book teacher agency book is about the relational structures and the relational resources that can be easily set up in school to increase teachers agency. Okay, so this is about thinking very carefully about not only what it is you want to do and how you're going to do it but also how you're going to smooth that path and what resources you're going to do to achieve that. So in terms of how you go about taking action in your own school it's about I think thinking about the people certainly teacher agency is dependent to some extent on people's capacity. Do you have the right people in place? Do they have the right professional capital the right skills and knowledge? Have they had the opportunities to make sense of this new curriculum? And if not, how are you going to do that? In terms of the school culture you know setting up a culture of collaborative inquiry in the school has been very very successful in some schools in Scotland. We work with a school for three years in East Lothian which is just one an award for its work in collaborative inquiry with the general teaching council and that is because it is adopted a non-hierarchical collaborative approach to developing its school planning. Reading groups could be part of that. In terms of the infrastructure what are you doing in your school to set up those relational resources? Do you have unbalanced relationships between management and staff for example where people aren't trusted? Do you have the system for people to come together and talk to each other? And again we work with a school in Scotland where they have made significant efforts to create channels for communication and spaces for dialogue and what they found was a lot of these former spaces turned into informal conversations and a culture of dialogue and collaboration developed in that school. And then thinking about as leaders as well what can you do to support and protect your staff? An important function of school leadership is actually protecting teachers from some of the issues which might put their innovation at risk. And we know from a lot of social science that it's not the existence of barriers often that stops innovation it's the perception that those barriers exist and head teachers can play a big role in mitigating those barriers. So in short what we're doing here is developing this ecological approach to teacher agency that we're building the capacity of our staff at the same time as creating an environment which doesn't disable them from developing the curriculum as they would like to. And I'm going to finish on this rather utopian slide here. I'm just I'm not going to say that we're in a paradise here I think there are going to be significant challenges ahead but I think that Wales stands at the crossroads and one potential future is actually a really powerfully enacted education system that's actually going to be the envy of the world. So I wish you the very best of luck in doing that. Thank you.