Ahead of making policy changes, public bodies such as the Department for Education and schools inspectorate Estyn can invite the submission of evidence and expertise from the public and/or interested organisations, to help them to decide if they have the correct approach or if they should make changes to their plans. Parentkind responds to consultations that directly impact on the role of parents in education, and you can find more details about previous responses we have made on this page.
Qualifications Wales - Qualified for the future
Qualifications Wales' consultation is looking at the kind of qualifications needed for the new curriculum. Their aim is for "16-year-olds in Wales take globally respected qualifications that inspire and prepare them for life, learning and work".
Parentkind has sent an organisational response, citing data from our Annual Parent Survey 2019 to support it. See
Qualifications Wales for details, and
our news article for how we considered a response.
Consultation on Estyn inspection arrangements
Have your say on the schools inspectorate Estyn's new inspection framework from 2021. The consultation closed on 2nd December. See the
Estyn website for details. See our
summary for parents.
Ensuring access to the full curriculum
The government in Wales is consulting on (among other things) removing the parental right to withdraw their child from both Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) and Religious Education (RE). On that issue, and other changes in readiness for Curriculum for Wales 2022, the government is consulting. The consultation closed 28th November 2019. See a summary of
our response to government.
Home education
Closed 21st October 2019
Welsh government sought parents' views on handbook for home educators and draft statutory guidance to help local authorities identify children not at school and to ensure they are receiving a suitable education.
Curriculum for Wales
Anti-bullying guidance
Closed 15th February 2019
Welsh Government held a consultation on their draft anti-bullying guidance and toolkit, which was developed to prevent and challenge bullying in schools. You can read the full consultation here.
The consultation provided an opportunity for parents to give their views on the government's proposals to date. We invited parents to take a short survey so that we could provide the government with robust evidence of what parents want. The questions in our survey were tailored to directly address the government's proposals. They were a great way to ensure parent voice is heard where individual parents did not have the time to complete the government’s questions and read the supporting documents.
Read more about the Consultation opportunities for parents in Wales here.
How we responded
We sent a big thank you to the 107 parents who took the time to complete our survey. We used statistical data and parents' comments to feed back to the Welsh government on the emotive and important issue as part of our work in championing and supporting 'parent voice' to be heard at local and national levels. Read the full results of our survey and our full response to the government here.
Uniform policy
The government consulted on the affordability, access and availability of school uniforms, gender-neutral uniforms and school uniform items for extreme weather conditions. Read the full consultation here.
We invited parents to take one a short survey so that we could provide the government with robust evidence of what parents want. The questions were tailored to directly address the government's proposals. It was a great way to ensure that parents could input if they didn't have the time to complete the government’s questions and read the supporting documents. Read more on the consultations and see the surveys here.
Guidance for parents
How we responded
We sent a big thank you to the 186 parents who took our survey on school uniform policy so that we could use their feedback to present evidence of parent voice to government on this important issue.
In total, 186 parents completed our short questionnaire, and many offered great ideas and shared concerns that they have about the school uniform policy at their child's school. We shared representative quotations and picked out our respondents' common themes when replying to government. Read more about the survey results here and our response to Welsh government.
Update
Welsh government guidance takes parents' school uniform concerns into account.