A reworked NSW primary school curriculum will aim to clearly set out expectations for teachers and students, replacing a more student-led model that had been popular with education experts for several decades.
Education Minister Prue Car said the updated curriculum would reshape education in the state over the coming decades.
“For the first time, primary school teachers have a set of syllabuses that make sense together and will ensure students have a strong foundation upon which to build their knowledge,” she said.
“Teachers will have clarity on exactly what they need to teach, based on evidence – taking away the guesswork and streamlining workload.”
“Evidence tells us a knowledge-rich curriculum to be explicitly taught in the classroom will work with our children,” she told reporters on Wednesday.
With Victoria only recently announcing a similar shift to explicit teaching in June, Car said the changes aligned with the direction of the national curriculum.
Belinda Brown, principal at Bowning Public School in southern NSW, said teachers were excited about the long-awaited reform.
“The most significant change is the ability to be very clear for teachers about what is important in their classroom, it’s about allowing teachers to be flexible for their context in their schools,” she said.
The Australian Education Research Organisation advocates that drilling in skills early gives children a solid base for learning, although some students, it says, need more guidance and time.
“This explains why certain teaching methods consistently yield better results across diverse student populations than others,” the organisation’s research and evaluation senior manager Zid Mancenido said earlier this month.
A perception that evidence-based teaching practices like explicit teaching hindered creativity and curiosity was unfounded, he said.
The changes across four syllabuses – science, history and geography, creative arts and PDHPE – have received widespread support from teachers, parents and school sectors, and reflect feedback from submissions made through two rounds of public consultation.
The revamped curriculum places greater focus on essential knowledge and provides more clarity for teachers on what all students need to learn, with more detailed and specific content.
It is clear, evidence-based and carefully sequenced to ensure students receive the best education possible.
While updated Maths and English syllabuses are already in classrooms across NSW, a number of other subject areas are ushering in significant updates.
Science and Technology
As part of changes unveiled today, there will be a new science and technology syllabus with more hands-on learning, giving students an understanding of how the human body works, including the skeletal, respiratory and circulatory systems, while also exploring fields such as space and climate systems.
It will provide students with increased hands-on learning experiences, including outdoor learning about animals, habitats and ecosystems, along with learning more about the earth and solar systems, climate, energy, food chains and electricity.
Human Society and Its Environment (HSIE)
History and Geography will be combined into one subject titled Human Society and its Environment (HSIE), and explore interconnected themes on both topics.
The new HSIE syllabus will include compulsory civics and citizenship content, with lessons on topics like democratic roles and responsibilities and the history of voting in a democracy.
There will be a strengthened focus on ensuring children have the skills to use tools for geography, such as maps and globes, Australian history, including Aboriginal cultures and history as well as the arrival of the First Fleet, and the events and people that led to Federation, plus topics that provide a window to the wider world, including ancient global civilisations.
Personal Development, Health and Physical Education (PDHPE)
The new PDHPE syllabus will for the first time include content addressing the healthy use of digital devices and the importance of balancing screen time with outdoor physical activity.
It will also make the teaching of fundamental movement skills explicit, which aligns with the latest research on the importance of developing essential movement skills in childhood to create a foundation for activity into adulthood, along with content to support students with physical disabilities to develop movement skills.
Age-appropriate lessons on respectful relationships and consent will also be part of the syllabus.
Elsewhere, the Creative Arts, inclusive of dance, drama, music and visual arts, has been updated to ensure students have an equal opportunity to develop their skills in each area.
Teachers will have two years to familiarise themselves with the updated syllabuses before their mandatory rollout in all NSW schools in 2027, but they can be implemented before then if schools choose to do so.
NSW Education Standards Authority chief executive Paul Martin said the new syllabuses would provide greater clarity to teachers.
“They are sequenced, coherent, knowledge-rich, and infer a more explicit teaching practice,” he said.
The syllabus upgrade come six years after then-education minister Rob Stokes, under Premier Gladys Berejiklian, announced a review of the K-12 NSW curriculum, with a focus on the primary years to give teachers more time to spend on literacy and numeracy.
Led by Geoff Masters, its focus was particularly on creativity and innovation and clarifying the teaching of ‘general capabilities’ – skills emphasised in the Gonski report that students would need for a 21st century job market.
The Gonski report, which had just been released at the time, called for a fundamental rethinking of how Australia educates children, saying the system has failed a generation of students as the country’s position continued to slide down OECD rankings.
“This is a once-in-a-generation chance to examine, declutter and improve the NSW curriculum to make it simpler to understand and teach,” Stokes told the Sydney Morning Herald at the time.
Opposition education spokeswoman Sarah Mitchell also said today that the current changes have resulted from a process started under the state’s former coalition government and they would create a system to meet the needs of every child.
The Perrottet Government announced a four-year plan to rewrite the curriculum in 2021.
(with AAP)
