Welsh teachers deserve their Sundays back. AI built for Wales could help.

In his contribution to Perago’s ‘Dear Incoming Government’ series, Chris Elias, Communications Lead at Perago, argues that the gap between Welsh education policy and what it feels like to be a teacher on a Sunday evening is a gap the incoming government can close. The ambition is already in the curriculum. The working examples are already in the system. What’s missing is the infrastructure to connect them.

Somewhere in Wales this Sunday, a teacher is planning next week’s lessons. The work itself is genuinely new. The Curriculum for Wales is not a relabelling of older schemes; it asks teachers to rethink what is taught, why it is taught, and how learning contributes to a child’s longer-term development. That is real professional work, and most teachers in Wales are doing it well. What takes the time is not the curriculum thinking itself. It is the layer underneath: the cross-referencing, the planning documentation, the effort of connecting what happens in the classroom to the four purposes of the Curriculum for Wales and to the statements of what matters. That layer is, for many teachers in Wales, the thing that eats the evening and the Sunday.

Wales has a curriculum that is genuinely worth that effort. It is ambitious, coherent, and built around a vision of education that goes well beyond subject knowledge. Its four purposes ask schools to develop young people who are ambitious capable learners, enterprising creative contributors, ethical informed citizens, and healthy confident individuals. It grounds learning in Welsh identity, community, and the wider world. It takes seriously the idea that what happens in a classroom should connect to a learner’s life, not just their exam results. That is not a small thing. Most education systems in the world are not attempting it.

The difficulty is implementation. Not because the curriculum is wrong, but because translating an ambitious framework into a Monday morning lesson, week after week, under workload pressure, is genuinely hard. Where the bureaucratic load gets heaviest is where the system has asked teachers to evidence the change rather than supporting them to enact it. Teachers in Wales are doing it anyway. They are also, in significant numbers, leaving the profession. Teachers in Wales are working an average of 56 hours a week. Seventy per cent strongly disagree they can manage their workload. Nearly three-quarters have seriously considered leaving in the previous twelve months. The workforce is shrinking. The Senedd’s own committee has named workload, behaviour challenges, and reform fatigue as the drivers.

The question AI should be answering

There is a lot of noise at the moment about AI in education. Most of it is about tools built for the National Curriculum for England, for US Common Core, or for no curriculum in particular. Useful in their context. Not designed for Welsh classrooms, Welsh learners, or the Curriculum for Wales. A Welsh teacher using them is doing the bridging work themselves, in their head, on top of everything else. Commercial licences run at around seven pounds per teacher per month. Welsh schools are already spending significant sums on tools that were not built for the curriculum they teach.

The more interesting question is what could AI – that has been designed specifically for the Curriculum for Wales – do. Not to replace the professional judgement of the teacher. That judgement is the point. But to support teachers through the work of curriculum-led design itself. To take the cross-referencing and the framework-connecting and make it lighter. And, more importantly, to support the thinking that the curriculum actually asks for.

There is a working example of this inside Hwb. It was built by Welsh education professionals who know the Curriculum for Wales from the inside. Teachers using it find themselves thinking differently about their lessons because the tool asks them to articulate their purpose before generating anything. What do you want your learners to take away from this? That question, asked before the response appears, is the curriculum’s ambition translated into the moment of planning. It connects intent to curriculum in a way that feels useful rather than bureaucratic. The planning gets sharper. The Sunday evening gets quieter. And, importantly, the tool supports teachers through professional change rather than asking them to evidence it.

The gap is not in the ambition. It is in everything that turns ambition into a national resource.

Wales has an AI strategy: AI Cymru. It sets out an ambition for ethical, empathetic, enterprising and effective use of technology across Welsh public services. Estyn has called for a coherent national approach to AI in schools. The Welsh Government has signalled that this is a priority. Ministers of every party heading into May 7 are committed in some form to reducing teacher workload through technology. The ambition is not in dispute.

What is missing is the infrastructure that turns a genuinely good working example into something the whole system can rely on. A working example needs an identity. Positive feedback from teachers needs to become evidence an official can assess. A proof of concept built by a few people needs governance, sustainability, and a plan for what happens as the curriculum evolves. Those things do not build themselves. And without them, the working example stays a working example, while the system continues to buy tools that were built for a different country’s curriculum.

That gap, between a thing that works in one place and a thing the whole system can depend on, is the same gap this series has been describing in council tax, in contact centres, in every domain where good intent and working practice need a piece of infrastructure in between to meet each other.

This is the territory Perago works in

Taking a working proof of concept and turning it into a product the system can endorse, fund and sustain is one of the specific things Perago does.

What does that actually involve? Helping the people who built the working example find the language that lets others understand what it is. Turning teacher feedback into evidence that officials and ministers can assess. Thinking through governance: who owns it, who maintains it, how it evolves. Mapping a sustainability route through the funding mechanisms that already exist in Welsh Government. Setting out a credible plan a minister can stand behind, not just a current state a minister can tour.

We have navigated these routes before. Perago helped create the Digital Strategy for Wales. We delivered the alpha phase of the Centre for Digital Public Services. We wrote the Digital Service Standards for Wales. We know how Welsh Government endorses, funds and governs digital products in education, because we have been in the rooms where those decisions get made.

First class policy deserves first class delivery. The incoming government does not need to build that from scratch. The working examples exist. The curriculum ambition exists. The question is whether Wales builds the infrastructure to connect them, or leaves teachers to keep bridging the gap on a Sunday evening. If the next Welsh Government wants to take this on, in education or in any of the places the same pattern is visible, we would be glad to help.

Dear Incoming Government is a Perago series published in the run-up to the May 2026 Senedd elections. You can read the full series here.