Challenge for primary school teachers implementing the Australian Curriculum

Over time, revisionism in education becomes inevitable. We've seen it happen repeatedly: new governments eager to make their mark; one-off test results blown out of proportion; states and territories tinker, adapt, adjust, renew the national curriculum; teachers feeling unsupported in implementing these changes; or just someone or something needing to be made the scapegoat.

Politicians, principals’ groups, education “experts”, primary teachers and their representatives, assert that primary school teachers find the national curriculum daunting. This perspective cannot be ignored nor diminished in any way. The real question is: why do primary school teachers feel this way?

Teachers, deeply focused on their students, often accept mandates from principals and system leaders as gospel truth, regardless of their personal views. Mandates pile up. The examples are endless… this curriculum must be taught year by year as written…the elaborations are to be taught…the general capabilities must be taught and assessed in this way…the cross-curriculum priorities must be taught in this way…you must assess in this way…you must record in this way…you must report grades this many times a year….and on and on.

The interesting thing with all these examples is that none of them came from the federal statutory authority that designed and developed the Australian Curriculum (AC). Any advice, policy position, imperative, directive on these matters would have come from the local education authorities or leaders in each state and territory.

Blaming the AC has become commonplace, but this detracts from addressing poor, ineffective or non-existent local responses in implementation, support, and resources for schools and teachers.

Improvement is necessary but fixating solely on the AC sidelines other valid criticisms and sustainable solutions.

How valid are the criticisms?

1. The AC has too much content? A key principle of AC design was to keep focus on core content (knowledge and skills) only, promote depth not breadth of teaching and learning, could be taught in about 80% of instruction time, AND every state/territory took on their version of the AC and in some instances added a lot more content.
2. The AC is not as good as other country’s curriculum? The content and standards of the AC were mapped against state/territory curriculum at the time and then internationally against excellent curriculum like UK, Hong Kong, Singapore, Ontario, NZ, Finland.
3. The cross-curriculum priorities (CCPs) add to much mandated content to learning areas? CCPS were seen by all states and territories as essential for a relevant, contemporary and engaging AC, they are not the curriculum, they don’t exist outside of learning areas and only where directly relevant , they are there to offer depth and richness to student learning, they are mostly represented in elaborations which are only examples providing illustrative guidance for teachers needing to better understand the essential content; and they were not MANDATED unless states/territories did so.
4. The general capabilities (GCs) add to much mandated content to learning areas? As per CCPs but also, Australia led the international community initially in describing how students can develop GCs (21^st century competencies) and how they could be integrated into the AC. Now they have been left behind by other nations making concerted inroads into appropriate integration not just in curriculum but importantly in assessment and pedagogy.
5. The AC is so unwieldy that there is no hard copy version? There was never intended to be a hard copy version printed centrally. The digital publication enables teachers to have flexibility in how they view and organise the curriculum, relevant resources to be tagged to content and accessible in a digital form, teachers to print views they want and to share information and resources across the country, and the curriculum to remain dynamic and responsive to user feedback and research.

What is valid?

Developing a comprehensive curriculum with explicit content and standards is a double-edged sword for primary school teachers. For the first time, they have clarity with detailed and transparent information on what needs to be taught and learnt, and how children develop conceptual understandings and skills not just in literacy but for each learning area. On the other hand, there are overwhelming expectations, being held accountable to teach, assess and report against explicit standards for multiple subjects that they had never learnt nor taught before. This can manifest as an overcrowded curriculum and/or an overworked teacher.

What could a futures-oriented solution be?

The important thing to have done, to do, is to have a serious review of structures, functions, roles and funding, aligned to the implicit and explicit expectations of the curriculum reform, with a view to building capacity of the system and its people over time. 

This could include for example, changes to primary school teacher training and recruitment, deployment of both additional specialist and support teachers across regions, sharing of specialist teachers across schools and how they work with classroom teachers, CPD for teachers including training, mentoring, coaching and collaborative time for planning, advice and training for school leaders to ensure effective and appropriate curriculum delivery and instruction. 

Whatever form of support it takes, primary school teachers must have the confidence that they are equipped to ensure their students receive the best quality instruction to achieve the standards commensurate with their abilities across each of the learning areas.