The Opposition has gone further to suggest the document is “too complex and infused with ideology”, contending the three mandatory cross-curriculum priorities are hampering students’ development of foundational skills in literacy, maths and science.
President of the Australian Primary Principals Association (APPA), Angela Falkenberg, told EducationHQ the curriculum “prescribes too much”.
“If you look at the whole curriculum in its entirety, we think part of the elephant in the room is that you actually can’t cover it all,” she said.
“And if [teachers] want to go deeper, in the time available, you [simply can’t do that well].
“We’ve got this expectation that all this [content] will be covered, and that’s the bit we’re [not supportive of] – we don’t want to talk about coverage, we want to talk about deep learning that’s purposeful, that students are engaged in, but also that teachers can be responsive to [learning opportunities] that come up in the community.”
Falkenberg said the nation’s primary schooling system was “very secondary-centric”, possibly to children’s and teachers’ detriment.
“You know, the division, the grades, the subjects. And in doing so, and trying to prescribe so much, we haven’t paid attention to the notion of playful curiosity and the deep wondering and engagement, and the space to go deeper on things.”
New Coalition curriculum analysis found there were nearly 2500 ways for teachers to weave into lessons the three mandatory cross-curriculum priorities of sustainability, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures, and Australia’s engagement with Asia.
The report said that more than half of all content taught from F-10, across all subjects (excluding languages), is impacted by one or more of these priorities.
Meanwhile, it found a total of 2451 curriculum ‘elaborations’ as to how these priorities can be absorbed into lessons, with 75 per cent of these relating to Indigenous history and culture.
“For instance, in Year 2 maths, teachers are encouraged to use ‘First Nations Australians’ stories and dances to understand the balance and connection between addition and subtraction’,” a media release from Shadow Minister for Education Sarah Henderson noted.
“When teaching Year 4 maths about calculating time, teachers are encouraged to explore ‘First Nations Australians’ explanations of the passing of time through cultural accounts and cyclic phenomena involving sun, moon and stars’,” it added.
Henderson said this focus went directly against international best practice.
“While learning Indigenous history and culture is vital to every child’s education, the requirement to embed cross-curriculum priorities in every subject flies in the face of world-leading curricula which is focused on the core knowledge students need to excel at school,” she contended.
“A concise, knowledge-rich curriculum aligned to international best-practice is also crucial to reducing the burden on teachers and providing them with the support they deserve.”
But Falkenberg said public school principals really valued the capabilities and cross-curriculum priorities included in the document.
“And it’s not about including them every lesson,” she said.
“…the fact that we are now including [First Nation’s history and perspectives] does not mean we’re doing too much of it. I think we’re just trying to provide alternate perspectives.
“We see these (priorities) as big concepts”.
The Coalition argued the primary curriculum is so “unwieldy” that ACARA lacks the resources to produce a hard copy version.
“If the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority can’t print this document, how can teachers and parents be expected to read and understand it?”
In 2023, a damming report by Learning First suggested a fundamental cause of Australia’s long-term educational decline – despite numerous reform efforts – was the national curriculum itself.
The analysis concluded that our “shallow and narrow” science curriculum was an outlier on the global stage, lacking the content, depth and breadth needed to enable students and teachers to succeed.
Compared to those of seven high-performing systems around the world – England, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, the US and Canadian provinces Alberta and Quebec – it found our curriculum included much less science content, was poorly sequenced, and lacked specificity of content, ultimately setting a comparatively low standard for student achievement.
A content gap between Australia and other systems begins to develop at primary school and grows every year, the report warned.
“By Year 8, the lack of content in the Australian science curriculum is so great that it has only about half of the average content of the other benchmarked curriculums. In terms of the volume of content in its science curriculum, Australia is an outlier,” it stated.
Last year AERO warned that Australia ought to heed the harsh lessons from those school systems around the world that have opted to ditch a knowledge-rich curriculum in favour of a skills-based one.
“The cognitive science tells us that all students benefit from a curriculum that aligns with the processes of acquiring, retaining, retrieving and consolidating learning...” researcher Kate Griffiths said at the time.
Meanwhile, Henderson has pledged the Coalition’s determination to “get back to basics” in classrooms by “focusing on explicit instruction and other evidence-based teaching methods which prioritise reading, writing, maths and science”.
“Raising educational standards is all part of our plan to get Australia back on track,” she said.
But Falkenberg laments the constant questioning of teachers’ professional judgement in the public sphere.
“We talk about esteeming the profession, but we don’t actually model it.
“I did leave teaching and worked [in] health for a time.
“And I don’t hear nurses’ practice being critiqued all of the time. I don’t hear someone saying, ‘oh, nursing’s not knowledge-rich, we’ve got to revamp it’.
“I’m just curious why education is so contested or so debated…”
