Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. Today, I am publishing the refined curriculum for Wales guidance. This sets out: guidelines for every school to develop their curriculum; expectations around assessment arrangements to support learner progression; and the proposed legislative requirements to secure a consistency of approach for learners across the country.

Improving education is our national mission. Nothing is so essential as universal access to the experiences, knowledge and skills that our young people need for employment, for lifelong learning and active citizenship. Our new guidance is a clear statement of what is important in delivering a broad and balanced curriculum and education. The four purposes are the shared vision and aspiration for every child and young person. And, in fulfilling these, we set high expectations for all, promote individual and national well-being, tackle ignorance and misinformation, and encourage critical and civic engagement.

Our guidance is the product of a prolonged process of co-construction, involving practitioners from schools across Wales. I would like to take this opportunity to thank those practitioners for their commitment over the last three years in jointly drafting this guidance. I would also like to thank the individuals and organisations who engaged during the feedback phase last year, after the draft guidance was released. The quality and detail of these contributions has helped to make significant improvements. In the autumn, I published the analysis of this feedback; today, I am also publishing a response to that feedback, alongside the guidance.

Over the autumn, practitioners and officials have worked to refine the guidance in response to that feedback, and in particular to: simplify and reduce the volume of guidance; clarify which parts of the new curriculum framework will be mandatory to ensure equity across schools; and provide greater clarity and detail where practitioners require more support, giving them guidance on designing their own curriculum. This feedback, together with the process of co-construction, has been critical: guidance made by practitioners, for practitioners, through an ongoing dialogue with the whole of our education system.

Seeing all practitioners as curriculum designers represents a fundamental shift for education in Wales. The new guidance does not give a prescriptive programme that can simply be delivered. Instead, it is about empowering practitioners to decide what will help their learners to become ambitious and capable, ethical and informed, enterprising and creative, and healthy and confident. 

The new guidance focuses on a more integrated approach to learning. The six areas of learning and experience bring together familiar disciplines and encourage strong and meaningful links across them. While disciplines remain important, this new approach supports learners to build connections across their learning, helping them understand not only what they learn, but why they learn it.

Our new guidance also places learner progression at its heart, with assessment playing a fundamental part in supporting this. The guidance has been fully informed by international evidence of progression. This will enable every learner to make progress throughout their education, in every area and discipline, rather than simply doing more and more of the acquiring of facts. Today's publication also includes specific guidance on developing assessment arrangements to support learner progression and enable every learner to make progress by ensuring that they are both supported and challenged.

Beyond the emphasis on co-construction, these changes are distinct from many of the similar types of reforms that we see elsewhere in three key respects. The learning outcomes in our guidance are based on robust evidence and methodology to sustaining learning over three-year periods. Outcomes elsewhere are often very narrow or vague, providing insufficient direction to practitioners. Our guidance is focused on schools designing their own curriculum. Reforms elsewhere often leave this entirely implicit. The 'Designing your Curriculum' section will help practitioners to develop a high-quality curriculum.

And we are working with our partners to ensure that schools are fully supported to realise the curriculum in their school within the framework that we have set out. International evidence makes clear that this next stage—implementation of our reforms—is the biggest challenge. After Easter, I will publish our curriculum implementation plan based on where schools should focus their efforts at different points up to 2022, and how we and the middle tier will support them in that process.

The feedback phase made clear that additional, specific guidance will be required to support practitioners in specific areas. To this end, Deputy Presiding Officer, in the next 18 months I will also publish a framework for religion, values and ethics to inform the development of the agreed syllabuses in each local authority; guidance for relationships and sexuality education; guidance on careers and work-related experiences; enabling steps to support learners at the very beginning of the learning continuum; a curriculum for funded non-maintained nursery settings to adopt; and guidance on developing a curriculum for pupil referral units and for those responsible for the provision of education other than at school.

It is now essential that Government, regional consortia, Estyn and local authorities work together to support every school, setting and practitioner to understand the new curriculum and to deliver it. In addition to my commitments to professional learning, officials are working with regional consortia and Estyn to establish national networks of practitioners and experts to share expertise and learning, and identify priorities for supporting the profession in readiness. Officials are working with practitioners to identify priorities for the development of resources, to ensure a range of supporting material is available by 2022 to help practitioners develop their own curriculum. Officials are also working closely with Qualifications Wales as it considers how qualifications may need to change to align with and support the new curriculum. This presents a fresh opportunity to consider the nature and role of qualifications for 14 to 16-year-olds.

Let me be clear: the publishing of this curriculum guidance is only the next step of co-construction. Government will continue to work closely with the profession to make this a success. But it is now for every practitioner to engage fully what has been published. Schools should take space and time to understand the model of the curriculum and start to discuss how their vision and values will eventually inform their own curriculum. They should not rush into trying to plan or implement it right now.

This new curriculum represents the very best of the education profession’s efforts. The next step in our reform journey is to prepare the profession to make it real in every classroom and for every learner in our nation.