Australian Curriculum gets an F for failing teachers and students

In the decade since the national curriculum was introduced in 2010, the average science scores of Australian 15-year-olds on the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests have fallen by 24 points, putting them a year behind the results achieved by their Australian peers in 2009.

Competitive federalism could help

Correlation isn’t causation. Yet surely it is fair enough to connect poor student achievement with the vagueness and deficiencies in a curriculum setting out what is taught in schools.

The irony is that the national curriculum, an initiative of the Howard government, was designed to standardise teaching and learning across the nation’s classrooms.

But a poor quality, dumbed-down, lowest-common-denominator national curriculum makes the case for competitive federalism, and for allowing the state governments that actually run school systems to set the curriculum, so that jurisdictions could learn from the best-performing states.

The holes in the national science curriculum appear to recur across all subject areas. ACARA’s six-yearly review, completed last year, was supposed to refine and update the curriculum so that teachers, students and parents had a clearer idea of what needs to be covered as children progress through school.

But according to an evaluation by the Australian Education Research Organisation, the new version of the curriculum still fails to “provide sufficient guidance to teachers”, doesn’t “lay out a sequence for teaching and guide to assessment”, and needs more “specific detail about the knowledge students are expected to attain, and the means by which this learning should be demonstrated”.

Missing rigour and accountability

Educational fads and culture wars over the basics of teaching and learning are, unfortunately, nothing new: witness the quarter-century struggle over phonics or sounding out words to help kids learn to read, or the controversy over direct instruction of students by teachers, based on carefully planned lessons, that should be a no-brainer.

Yet for education outsiders it’s still hard to fathom the unacceptable lack of basic rigour and accountability for teaching, learning and testing in the foundational curriculum documents.

Australia’s education ministers have nevertheless signed off on the new curriculum, in part because the short-term political incentive is to avoid getting dragged into educational fights when the distant pay-off for educational excellence is a long-term improvement in student results.

Yet the policy context is federal Education Minister Jason Clare’s ambitious plan to increase university attendance beyond 50 per cent of school-leavers, and the need for a highly educated workforce, especially in STEM – science technology, engineering and maths – fields to progress the energy transition and Labor’s advanced manufacturing plans, as well as for the building and maintenance work in the AUKUS nuclear submarine program.

None of this will be achievable without a national curriculum that supports effective teaching and learning. Mr Clare and his state counterparts should order ACARA to go back to the drawing board, and demand that the national curriculum clearly sets out what must be taught, learned and tested in Australian schools.