Blippit and the Curriculum for Wales

If you're responsible for knowing how the new Curriculum for Wales is shaping up in your school, or any subject within it, then like many other schools working on the details, you'll know that the job is a big one.

A commonly shared view is that in your own school or even in a cluster of schools, as a leader, it's particularly difficult to get examples of good up to date practice. People are keen to share to get common agreement about what, for example, 'secure' in PS2 writing looks like.

We're told that the curriculum in Wales is still taking shape locally in schools and that, as difficult as it is, Headteachers are doing their very best to make the most of the opportunities that it brings.

In early 2024, Blippit was invited to collaborate with schools in Wales to help support Headteachers who wanted everybody in their school to use their time in smart ways to understand how things are taking shape in each subject.

Thanks to a very productive collaboration with 4 Welsh schools, Blippit enables Welsh schools to gather in and easily organise work examples (video, photos, audio, text) to illustrate and evidence the Four Purposes and Areas of Learning Experience, for example, to make access easy to examples of good practice.

Bespoke Curriculum Organisation in Welsh schools

There are differences in how schools organise and describe their curriculumof course. Recently, for example, we collaborated with a Welsh primary school to provide them with 8 tailor-made bespoke curriculum organisation categories that their teachers use to label, or 'tag' as well call it, examples of curriculum practice in school.

As standard, Blippit provides Curriculum for Wales tagging categories in Blippit Boards pre-made and schools can use what they need. Using the dasboard, schools can run reports for any aspect of the curriculum that has been tagged and interact with it graphically as charts too.

“Blippit Boards allowed us to get everything into one place, it's really accessible, it's really quick and easy to access through things like the tags and the filters and the date range and all of those kind of things. It's also allowed us to ensure the whole teaching staff and governors are able to contribute towards their self-evaluation activities.”
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^{Mr. R Hatwood, Headteacher. Ysgol Yr Holl Saint - All Saints' School}

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‍Top 3 uses of Blippit^® for schools in Wales

1. To promote consistency and raise the profile of key Curriculum for Wales priorities, whatever they may be in a individual schools.
2. Cluster and school-wide sharing of teacher-assessed standards in, for example, writing, AoLE and much more.
3. To promote and build on collaborative practice in school or school clusters

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Schools are all different

• A priority for Welsh-first schools is that Welsh language tagging is supported for teachers in areas, whether it's 'translanguaging' in LLC or 'health and wellbeing' in AoLE and it is. Our CfW tags are all provided in English and Welsh as standard.
• Share local area examples of, for example, writing in English, as assessed by teachers in your school/cluster as emerging, developing, secure and embedded.
• Improve professional development for teachers where face-to-face discussion is supported by up to date Blippit Boards reports
• Everybody is looking for simplicity, time savings and impact on practice and Blippit Boards, built with teachers and school leaders, delivers on these every day!

Blippit Boards Dashboard & the Curriculum for Wales

A big-picture view like this helps teachers and leaders find what they need quickly in the Blippit Dashboard.

1. Do you have an inkling about one of the Four Purposes at your school being strong but the evidence isn't there?
2. Have you heard great things about the new Science and Technology scheme at another school in your cluster and you'd like to see how it's evidenced?

Questions like these are answerable with the timely help of the Blippit Boards app and dashboard. Good practice captured in the curriculum using the app drives what the dashboard can illuminate in chart or report format.

To stay on the right side of GDPR, your school can share reports, perhaps with a cluster school or even a parent, that are cleansed of personal information because Blippit generates editable Docx reports as well as PDF.

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More: Read about Blippit's collaboration with Headteachers in Wales.

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