Education in Wales since Devolution: Three Waves of Policy, and the Pressing and Reoccurring Challenge of Implementation

On the occasion of 25 years since the advent of devolution to Wales, this article explores the three distinct waves of Welsh education policy and practice which have been identified and explored by the authors of this article and other commentators as having occurred since 1999 (Egan, 2017; Connolly, et al., 2018; Titley et al., 2020; Evans, 2022; Milton et al., 2023). It starts by tracing the early days of the devolved settlement, and the experimental approach to new policy piloted between 1999 and 2010 (Moon, 2012). It then looks at the policy turn towards greater accountability and challenge signalled in 2010 following the disappointing 2009 PISA results (Davies et al., 2018), which constituted the start of the Second Wave. It then critically examines the Third Wave of policy from around 2015, which is characterised by Wales’s ambitious reform journey (OECD, 2017) embodied in the national mission for education (Welsh Government, 2017a). It proposes that Wales has, since around 2021, entered a distinctive and challenging phase within this transformative Third Wave of policy. The current situation, we argue, is characterised by uncertainty and unprecedented levels of system upheaval which have arisen from the reach, scope and the complex practical implications of implementing the post-2015 reforms. This article concludes that to realise the ambitious curriculum reform agenda it has set itself, Wales now needs to ask searching questions about the implementation and the clarity of curricular guidance; to re-evaluate its approach to subsidiarity; and to heed the warnings from other jurisdictions where similar curriculum reforms have negatively impacted learner outcomes and exacerbated inequalities. Without this there may be implications for realising the Curriculum for Wales, teacher retention and learner experiences in Wales.