How can Welsh primary schools deliver Curriculum for Wales without writing everything from scratch?

Fourteen years of earned trust

Llanilltud Faerdref Primary School in Pontypridd has worked with Cornerstones for fourteen years. That relationship did not begin out of convenience. In the early days, the school’s senior leaders were looking for something more engaging, and a curriculum structure that felt purposeful rather than fragmented. Sarah Rudall, Deputy Headteacher, explains what drew them in and what has kept them there.

We felt our curriculum was a little stagnant and needed brightening up, plus we felt we wanted to move to a theme-based approach. And over the years we have come to trust that the Cornerstones team will have done the research that we don't have the time to do, and that has helped us immensely.

That trust matters, because when Curriculum for Wales arrived, the school needed to move quickly. Tom Lewis, Headteacher, was clear that the priority was continuity for staff and pupils, not a wholesale rebuild. The question was whether the tools they already had could meet the new framework’s demands.

An immediate advantage

When Maestro, the Cornerstones digital platform, was introduced, the school’s long familiarity with the curriculum meant the transition felt manageable rather than disruptive. Where neighbouring schools were piecing together resources and mapping documents from scratch, Llanilltud Faerdref already had a coherent base to work from.

With Maestro we immediately felt at an advantage because we already had everything in one place.

Getting the platform up and running did not place an unreasonable burden on leadership. Sarah describes the practical reality of onboarding staff with characteristic understatement.

Actually the setup is really very easy and then we just have to explain it to the staff, and we have gone from strength to strength with it!

For a school managing 180 pupils through a period of significant national change, that ease of implementation was not a small thing. The Welsh curriculum’s Areas of Learning and Experience bring with them substantial documentation, and Maestro absorbs much of that complexity.

It is all there at the click of a button instead of reading enormous documents for each Area of Learning.

Protecting staff and informing teaching

Reducing workload is one thing. What the school also needed was a way to track how children were progressing across the breadth of the new curriculum, without adding layers of separate systems for teachers to maintain. The assessment functionality within Maestro has made that possible in a way that feels coherent rather than burdensome.

This means we are confident we can evaluate class and individual performance in different areas of the curriculum. It makes no sense to use a separate assessment tool, we are not overwhelming staff with workload and Maestro helps them understand how to move to the next step in teaching.

Alongside that practical value, there is something less tangible but equally important, the sense that the school’s feedback is heard. Primary schools often feel at the mercy of external decisions, and curriculum providers are no exception to that frustration. For the team at Llanilltud Faerdref, the relationship with Cornerstones feels different.

Teachers often feel like they are not listened to, but Cornerstones is very open, and we feel listened to and valued.

Summary

Llanilltud Faerdref’s story is not about a school that had an easy ride through curriculum change. Curriculum for Wales brought real complexity, and the pandemic made an already pressured period harder. What the school did have was a foundation they trusted and a platform that absorbed much of the mapping, resourcing and assessment work that would otherwise have fallen to individual teachers. For headteachers now weighing up how to meet the demands of the Welsh curriculum without starting again, that is the central reassurance here: fourteen years of relationship meant the school arrived at a moment of national change already ahead, not behind.

Tom Lewis and Sarah Rudall would be the first to say that no curriculum provider does all the work for you. But having a partner who has done the research, built the resources and kept the framework coherent means that the work that remains is the work that matters: knowing your children, knowing your community, and teaching well.