Wales' new curriculum is moving humanities lessons beyond the basics

Here, Dr Geraint Davies and Dr Sioned Hughes explore how schools in Wales are reinventing literacy, numeracy and the humanities

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THE classroom hums with energy.

A group of pupils cluster around a whiteboard covered in coloured markers, arguing over which county in Wales has seen the biggest rise in food bank use.

One insists it's Merthyr; another says Rhondda.

They scroll through graphs, check sources and begin to sketch out why some communities struggle more than others. Then the discussion shifts.

“Is it fair,” one pupil asks quietly, “that some people have to rely on food banks at all?”

It's not a maths lesson. It’s RVE - religion, values and ethics - one of the new pillars of Wales’ reimagined curriculum.

And in this single lesson, you can see something powerful _ taking shape: literacy, numeracy, history, and ethics, all intertwined in a conversation about fairness, community and humanity.

A NEW KIND OF LEARNING

Across Wales, schools are undergoing one of the most ambitious curriculum changes in a generation.

The Curriculum for Wales, now fully rolled out, doesn’t just shuffle subjects; it reshapes the very purpose of education.

Instead of treating “reading, writing and arithmetic” as separate boxes to tick, it asks teachers to weave them through everything pupils learn - from science to art, geography to philosophy.

It’s a shift from teaching skills in isolation to using them in context. And nowhere is this more visible than in the Humanities Area of Learning and Experience, which brings together history, geography, business, social studies and RVE.

‘The goal is simple but profound: to help young people not only to know things, but to understand and question them.

To make sense of data, to weigh up evidence, to read critically, to write with clarity and conviction - and to see how numbers and _ narratives connect to the real world they live in.

WHERE NUMBERS TELL HUMAN STORIES