News

National Updates - November 2024

Emergency planning and response guidance for education and childcare settings.
As some parts of Wales have experienced snow recently, we thought it would be useful to provide the link to the following guidance that includes information on severe weather and school closures.

School Teachers’ Pay and Conditions (Wales) Document 2024.

Press Release – Attendance, literacy and numeracy central to improving school standards as stats show schools attendance levels improve.
The Cabinet Secretary for Education has outlined the key improvement priorities for school in Wales as well as more funding for initiatives to improve attainment in literacy, maths and science.

Support for children and young people with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in educational settings.
How to help learners with Autistic Spectrum Disorder using a variety of approaches.

Qualifications Wales publishes a new guide to the National 14-16 Qualifications.
The guide has been designed to help educational professionals understand the changes to qualifications provision for 14 to 16-year-olds from September 2025 and aid centres’ continuing preparation. It also includes a toolkit to help centres communicate the new qualifications to learners, and their parents or carers, governors and other key local stakeholders.

Attendance of pupils in maintained schools: 2 September to 25 October 2024.
Management information provided by schools in Wales on attendance of pupils in maintained schools from 2 September to 25 October 2024.

Curriculum for Wales: updated sections of Framework guidance.

Welsh Government want your views on updated sections of the Curriculum for Wales Framework guidance, for updating online on Hwb in January 2025 – consulting on proposed minor and essential updates to some sections of the Curriculum for Wales Framework guidance on Hwb, which includes:

– wording to reflect the approach to published school curriculum summaries set out in the Continuing the journey section, which was published last January

– wording that better links personalised assessments with progression and assessment wording to clarify legislative changes from September

– minor amendments to the Designing your curriculum and Assessment arrangements sections to update language to ensure consistency with other sections of the Framework. This is to reflect where we are in curriculum rollout as well as addressing hyperlinks and typographical errors

– amending the Enabling learning section to better highlight it should be used in the planning, designing and implementing of a pedagogically appropriate curriculum for all learners, not just our youngest learners

– a number of minor amends following a bilingual review of ‘hover-over’ definitions used across the Framework.

Submit your comments by 20 December 2024.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) is monitoring the impact of its guidance on Preventing Hair Discrimination. The guidance provides practical resources for school leaders to create more inclusive environments and ensure compliance with equality law. They would like to invite school leaders, teachers, assistant teachers, governors and trustees of primary and secondary schools to complete a short survey to help them understand how these resources are being implemented and their effectiveness in preventing hair discrimination in schools.

This is a link to the short survey. The survey will be open until 5pm on Friday 17 January 2025.

This survey is anonymous. However, if you are happy for them to contact you for follow-up questions or a potential case study, please feel free to supply your contact details at the end of the survey. They process information in line with data protection legislation. Please see their Privacy Notice for further details.