What Sort of National Curriculum?
Hopes and Fears for Australian Education under Kevin Rudd
With all governments in Australia collaborating to establish a national curriculum for schools, the main debate centres on what it should contain.
The Australian Government, backed by the states and territories, has begun setting up a board to design the first national curriculum for Australian schools. The central question now is: What is essential learning for the nation’s children and how can the curriculum enable that?
What Should Be the Key Learning Areas?
Even before the Australian Labor Party under Kevin Rudd took office, there was general agreement across the nation’s governments that the school curriculum should include English, Mathematics, Science and History. Then, in March 2008, Julia Gillard announced that the Board would develop curricula for Geography and foreign languages once it has dealt with the initial four areas. The decision is well justified. There is equal justification for including the arts and physical education – and possibly other learning areas – but the government has so far given no indication that it will do so.
How Flexible Will Curriculum Requirements Be?
Some of the loudest participants in the public debate assert that the National Curriculum must allow each State to adapt courses to local students and circumstances. At the same time huge numbers of teachers deplore the inordinate amount of work and time they must currently invest in designing their own curriculum at the level of individual school and class. It is one of the main reasons for disillusionment and abandonment of a teaching career after only a few years.
While the teachers appreciate some leeway for introducing some content or approaches of their own choosing to meet the needs of the local students, they also need a prescribed general basis to work from. In Western Australia recently, they breathed a huge collective sigh of relief when, after many years, the government finally agreed to provide a syllabus for schools.
Striking the balance between national prescription and flexibility in the individual school may be one of the hardest jobs of the Board. And to what extent state-level bureaucracy should mediate curriculum delivery is another moot point.
Assessment and Reporting
In the interests of effective evaluation of Australian education some influential voices, such as the Australian Council for Educational Research, call for a uniform assessment and reporting system across all states and territories. This would enable comparison of school-performances across borders, which cannot be done reliably at present. This proposition is very worthy of inclusion on the Curriculum Board’s agenda.
At the same time whatever is devised for assessment and reporting as part of a national curriculum must be less restricting and less time-consuming than systems currently imposed to meet some states’ accountability requirements. In Kevin Donnelly’s words, such a system “reduces education to what can is easiest to measure and detracts from the joy of teaching.” These onerous demands are a significant factor leading to the loss of people from the teaching force in recent years.
What Can the National Curriculum Achieve?
Public debate about the standards of school achievement never dies, but just finds new forms and new participants. Now, with the likelihood of some sort of national curriculum appearing soon, many hope for agreement on standards across the country.
One focus should be on achieving conceptual and linguistic clarity in the curriculum documents. The curriculum must make it plain what education is trying to achieve in the classroom at each year-level. A vast number of Australian teachers and academics have for many years battled to understand the central statements in current curricula and most say they feel defeated. There is now a strong drive against the prevailing approach labelled as Outcome Based Education.
The end-result of school education is another focus. Australia has been enjoying high economic growth for many years while simultaneously suffering from a shortage of skilled workers like electricians, plumbers and carpenters. How can or should schools grapple with this need? On the other hand there is also a strong argument that the curriculum should inspire students to take on career fields involving science and mathematics. Such inspiration might come, for example, from multi-disciplinary approaches to problems.
Steer the Revolution from the Grass Roots!
Whatever the long-term outcomes of Kevin Rudd’s education revolution, curriculum development for Australian schools is set for an explosion of change in the next few years. If the final result is to benefit the nation caring people at the grass-roots should enter the affray to ensure all viewpoints are duly considered.
