6. Statement by the Minister for Education: The Curriculum and Assessment (Wales) Bill

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:59 pm on 8 July 2020.

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Photo of Jenny Rathbone Jenny Rathbone Labour 3:59, 8 July 2020

Thank you, Minister. I particularly was very pleased to hear you say that the relationship and sexuality education is going to have much more direction to it than some other parts of the curriculum. So, I won't ask you about that. I wanted to explore some of the complexities of your ambition, and I fully support it, to ensure that it's a duty on the headteacher to design the curriculum that's fit for that school, and the governing body to implement it. I want to just relate this to the demands of the Black Curriculum, which is a voluntary organisation set up at the beginning of 2019, obviously wanting to ensure that all UK schools incorporate black histories into the curriculum so that pupils have a full and accurate version of British history, which I think is an entirely laudable aspiration and one that we absolutely need to have if we're going to have a cohesive society. 

So, Mount Stuart Primary School, I am absolutely confident that they already have a really vibrant multicultural offer to their pupils. Under the leadership of Betty Campbell, it was already a template for that. Similarly, in many of the schools in my constituency, which will have a wonderful range of multicultural intake, this idea of people coming from different parts of the world with different cultures will already be well embedded into their thinking. But I just wondered how you think we're going to ensure that all schools with less rich intake will be enabled to address some of the more uncomfortable aspects of our culture and, frankly, racist aspects of our culture just as effectively as those schools that have that multiculturalism already built into them. Because we obviously need to ensure that all our pupils are ethically informed citizens.