From Cynefin to Cymru and beyond – debating the Curriculum for Wales and locating nation

This review article considers curriculum reform and implementation in Wales and its relationship with national identity and identities. The Curriculum for Wales is perhaps the most significant development in Welsh educational policy since devolution, and the centrepiece of the most recent set of policy reforms which began around 2016. As such, it has been much-studied, debated and theorised in recent years, with a great deal of the discussion focussing on its technical aspects, such as learner competence and progression, assessment, and its approach to the defining and integrating subject areas. Also prominent in recent debates has been discussion of more ideological questions around teacher agency, its emancipatory potential as regards teacher professionality, and its relationship to the wider ecology of educational accountability around it. Yet, discussion on the significance of the Curriculum for Wales in reflecting the diverse identities of contemporary Wales has perhaps been a more recent phenomenon, and commentators and researchers have only just begun to grapple with the potential impact that the curriculum will have on Wales’ sense of itself, and how the concept of Cynefin will be deployed as the principal vehicle for engagement with place, community and identities. This paper outlines the wider debates referenced above, before offering further reflection on the position of ‘nation’ in the Curriculum. It goes on to consider how sub-state nations, such as Wales, who have gained control of their curricula, produce and reproduce their specific ‘nationhood’ and complex national identities (historical, contemporary and emergent).