Supporting practitioners to engage philosophically with the Curriculum for Wales

Project summary

Drawing on research identifying the problems practitioners face when realising the four purposes of the Curriculum for Wales (CfW), this project will trial and develop a toolkit of philosophical resources to support educational practitioners in Wales. The work will be undertaken in collaboration with partners at the Neath Port Talbot (NPT) school support team to provide workshops to secondary school headteachers in the local area. This is in response to a need that they have identified. Resources will be developed in collaboration with the NPT education support officers and participating headteachers. The project will focus on developing and trialling resources at the local level, with the longer term aim of rolling these out nationally through pre-established pathways used by NPT partners. 

 Project aims

• To develop a philosophical toolkit to support local educational practitioners to deliberate fruitfully about curriculum planning and realisation. 
• To provide training to a local school support team to help them to facilitate philosophical thinking with their school partners. 
• To co-create and collectively evaluate the toolkit, with the aim of sharing these developed resources nationally. 

Project  context

The CfW is driven by four purposes which are designed to pervade every aspect of its implementation (Donaldson, 2015). As Welsh Government puts it, ‘a school’s curriculum is everything a learner experiences in pursuit of the four purposes’ (Welsh Government, 2024). Each of the four purposes captures a range of educational values as what it is that educators in Wales ought to agree is valuable about education. Students should be supported to become: 

1. Ambitious, capable learners, ready to learn throughout their lives
2. Enterprising, creative contributors, ready to play a full part in life and work
3. Ethical, informed citizens of Wales and the world
4. Healthy, confident individuals, ready to lead fulfilling lives as valued members of society

This focus on purposes marks a move from a subject based curriculum, to a values based one, where the end goal is the development of the child (Gatley, 2020). Designing a curriculum driven by the four purposes of the CfW involves thinking about educational values, both in terms of how to implement the multiplicity of values mentioned in the four purposes, and in terms of how to deal with the fact that school resources are limited, and trade-offs between different educational values are going to be necessary. This requires deliberation between practitioners to work out how best to help their students to flourish as individuals within and outside of their educational experiences. 

The ability to embed the values of the four purposes in curriculum design is currently a key concern for schools realising the CfW. In a recent report into the CfW, Estyn highlights ‘a clear whole school vision for teaching’ and ‘purposeful curriculum planning’ as attributes of successful schools (2025, p.1). Similarly, NPT’s school support team has found that while most headteachers are broadly in agreement with the aspirations of the Curriculum for Wales, a minority are yet to be convinced that working towards the four purposes is achievable. Some are reluctant to shift their practice from what has been a successful approach in terms of GCSE outcomes, and have tended not to focus on the four purposes in their curriculum design. This is as an obstacle to schools meaningfully realising the new curriculum (NPT, 2025). This chimes with research that I previously conducted which highlights the difficulties practitioners face when thinking about the purposes of the CfW and how to put them into practice (Gatley & Oostendorp-Godfrey, forthcoming).  

Project outcomes

What this project has to offer is a range of philosophical tools to help practitioners to address the sorts of decisions the CfW asks them to make. This draws on Dr Jane Gatley’s research covering issues surrounding the four purposes of the CfW and the dilemmas they give rise to. It also draws on my research into the value of philosophy, how to best conceptualise educational ideas, and philosophy for children and teachers as a pedagogy. This will be combined with research by Harry Brighouse, the Co-I, who has developed resources to help practitioners to think fruitfully about the philosophical and ethical questions they encounter in their practice through an educational goods framework, and normative case studies.

The project will trial running Philosophy for Children and Communities (P4C) style discussion sessions for headteachers, using specially tailored normative case studies as the starting points for the discussions, and the language of the educational goods framework to help participants to focus on salient educational issues. In combination, these tools and discussion sessions will help the headteachers to engage with the four purposes of the curriculum for Wales as they encounter dilemmas in their day to day work. The project will also support the NPT school support team to deliver similar sessions in future, and will work towards creating resources so that these sessions can be recreated across Wales.

Project participants will help to evaluate and shape resources for the future. Evaluation of the resources will be ongoing, with the NPT school support team, and participating headteachers reflecting on each session as it happens. The final workshop will take place several months after the initial three sessions and will focus on the impact of the previous sessions on headteachers, and how resources might be improved and adapted based on their experiences.