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The people of Wales will head to the polls tomorrow for an election like no other since devolution.

The Welsh Parliament is almost certain to change colour and if polling is correct, Welsh Labour will soon relinquish its iron-clad grip of power for the first time in Senedd history.

What this means for education is anyone’s guess; schools, teachers, pupils and parents have only ever known a Welsh government led by Welsh Labour first ministers.

But a quarter century of “progressive” policy innovation in education - most evident in the Foundation Phase, Welsh Baccalaureate and all-consuming Curriculum for Wales (CfW) - has not paid dividends.

Performance in the influential Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) study has been disappointing, to put it mildly, and Wales continues to prop up the rest of the UK in reading, maths and science.

Wales’ stubborn attainment gap

The stubborn attainment gap between deprived pupils and their more affluent peers remains impenetrable, and there has been little return on Wales’ huge investment in the .

And just when you thought it was safe to come out from behind the sofa, Wales’ chief schools inspector, Owen Evans, announced that there were “significant weaknesses in the development of some of the basics of education” and that the system had been “held back by inconsistency, mixed priorities and, at times, a lack of good quality teaching and learning”.

His startling intervention, acerbic by Estyn’s standards, felt like a significant blow to the Welsh government’s already tainted reputation for education delivery.

But a change in political leadership, if indeed it happens, is not guaranteed to make a noticeable difference to pupil outcomes, however much those vying for authority seek to persuade voters otherwise.

Funding is scarce and problems - both domestic and international - are mounting up; the magic money tree has been shaken for all its worth.

The question, then, is not so much what we can bring in as what we can do differently; making better what we already have might be the limit of possibility in these uncertain times.

The sprawling behemoth Curriculum for Wales

High on my list of priorities would be CfW, a sprawling behemoth that will, in time, have implications for everyone living, working and learning in Wales.

It is hard to overstate how significant a reform this is, yet teachers across the country are still grappling with its consequences more than a decade after its unveiling.

Based on Scotland’s controversial Curriculum for Excellence, CfW is less prescriptive than more traditional curricula, built around holistic educational aims and objectives, and significantly more reliant on the capacity and willingness of teachers to design their own ways of working.

The predominant issue inherent in such a model is one of inconsistency; a deliberate rowing back from specified content gives rise to concern that “anything goes” - a charge that calls into question the equitable foundation on which education is built.

It cannot be assumed that children from disadvantaged backgrounds will have access to and benefit from the same resources, technologies and parental support as those more privileged, and so exposing pupils to so-called “powerful knowledge” (seemingly lacking in Wales) is considered one way of levelling an uneven playing field.

Learning from Scotland

Whoever wins power in tomorrow’s Senedd election must review CfW as a matter of urgency. That does not mean I advocate a complete reversal, or indeed deviation from the principled purposes that frame, neatly I think, what we aspire for our children and young people.

This is more about renewal than relaunch, and it is entirely normal that a curriculum should be subject to ongoing evaluation; what and how we teach is always open to negotiation and never set in stone.

Scotland’s Curriculum Improvement Cycle (CIC), designed to ensure that the Scottish curriculum remains up to date and relevant, offers a useful model in this regard; though something shorter and more focused is needed in the first instance.

Ollie Bray, who leads on CIC for Education Scotland, told members of the Scottish Parliament recently that teachers in Scotland did not want a prescriptive curriculum nor a curriculum that allowed them complete autonomy.

Instead, he said, CIC was seeking to develop a curriculum with “clarity but flexibility” to allow for local adaptation.

Dangers of ripping up and starting again

The curriculum in Wales, it would appear, has overcompensated on flexibility, to the detriment of clarity.

There are some who think that CfW is a , a multi-million-pound project we are sticking with to save face rather than because we have a genuine belief in its transformative potential.

I disagree, and would warn very strongly against ripping up and starting again - far too many tears have been shed getting the curriculum to where it is today. Pulling the plug now would only serve to alienate those who have bought in so enthusiastically to its vision for a brighter future.

We need a stocktake, not a completely different shop.

But that does not mean we should pretend that all is well with CfW, either - the place of knowledge and the centrality of literacy and numeracy, all of which have been lost in the noise, need urgent attention.

Now feels like a good time to pause and reflect on how much knowledge every child should reasonably expect to accumulate during their time in school. Such things should not be left to chance.

CfW’s designer-in-chief, Graham Donaldson, once wrote of learning as an “expedition”, punctuated with “stops, detours and spurts”.

It might just be that Wales needs a sharper compass.

Dr Gareth Evans is director of education policy at University of Wales Trinity Saint David. He writes in a personal capacity and tweets