Australia's Curriculum Dilemmas

State Cultures and the Big Issues

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• Publisher: MUP Academic Digital
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780522857726
• eBook ISBN: 9780522860122
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Affairs & Administration
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Australia's Curriculum Dilemmas tells the story of Australia's recent attempts to come to grips with the big challenges of curriculum and sets up the background to understanding the debates that continue to surface as we move for the first time towards a national approach.
Detailing some of the inside stories and arguments of the last 30 years about what schools should do, as well as some of the politics and lessons that have been learnt along the way, it brings together accounts from a national research project and reflections from people who have been actively involved in developing curriculum policies for each state. Expert contributors examine the challenges of the public management of curriculum, drawing on the different experiences of curriculum reforms in different states. They take up the problems of framing vocational and academic education for the new century and of confronting equity and diversity issues. They show the fundamental differences that exist in Australia regarding the impact of examinations and assessment, and the very different policy approaches that have been taken to tackle these issues.
Many people in this country are unaware of how much their experience of education has been formed by the particular values of the state in which they were educated. For the first time, this book demonstrates the effects of those differences, now and into the future.

Part I
Introduction

CHAPTER 1

Australian curriculum making

Lyn Yates, Cherry Collins and Kate O’Connor

Curriculum is a deceptively complicated topic. It is an everyday topic, often in the newspapers, and a topic about which many have strong views. It is a topic where people may have stronger views about what they don’t want, than what they do want. They know they want young people to write grammatically and spell correctly—but beyond basic literacy and numeracy, what else is needed as the best foundation for a world that is changing so very rapidly? And what should young people be learning in science in year 9, as compared with grade 6 or year 12? Curriculum is a topic on which the same people can hold some quite contradictory views and hopes and prejudices. They may want schools to be state of the art places, with a lot of visible new technology, where the new types of knowledge and work of the twenty-first century are taken up; but they may also be quite uncomfortable about any changes or ‘watering down’ of the kind of curriculum they had encountered themselves as children.

Curriculum is a field of practice where those responsible for developing curriculum policies may spend very little of their time focusing directly on what is to be taught or learned in schools. Instead they may be talking about things like ‘standards’, or how to allocate resources, or how to manage assessment to meet the needs of different external purposes. Curriculum is locally familiar and it is a state and Commonwealth political football, it is a subject of international comparisons, it is argued over by experts around the world. And, in Australia, curriculum has been in the past developed by state authorities of various kinds, with occasional Commonwealth interjections. Now curriculum is about to be developed differently, in the form of a new national Australian Curriculum in which both states and Commonwealth (and representatives of non public schools) are taking part. This new development has been generated by, but is also developing in a new way, a growing national conversation about what curriculum should be now, in Australia, in the twenty-first century.

In this book we want to explore some of our recent history of doing curriculum around the country, and at the same time, we want to pay attention to state differences in this curriculum history. We think it is particularly timely to do both. For one thing, at this beginning point of developing a new ‘national’ curriculum, it is important to be aware of some of the differences between states in how they have approached curriculum policy and curriculum-making in the past, given that a number of previous attempts to begin to work on curriculum nationally have not succeeded.¹ Direct political interests of states relative to each other and to the Commonwealth government have intervened, but so too have the histories of each state and its schooling authorities, and the different commitments they have built to what matters in terms of curriculum.

For another, the late twentieth century and beginning of this century have been an intense period of change and attempted curriculum reform. Report after report has been commissioned by various Ministers and state authorities. Into the 80s, ‘essential learnings’, ‘new basics’, ‘outcomes-based education’, the National Policy for the Education of Girls and a later parliamentary report on the education of boys, vocational education, values education, citizenship education, public debates about history curriculum—an immense array of reports and new guidelines, and new proposals for schools and what and how they should be teaching, as well as where and how they should be assessing students.

In this book we bring together stories of some of these new developments: what they were trying to do, what was influencing or driving them, why they failed (sometimes bringing Ministers down with them)—or why they have persisted. Many of these accounts are by insiders who have been involved with the curriculum of a particular state over a long period; others are drawn from our own research project on curriculum policy-making around the nation over the past half-century. In this book we take up some of the key issues that curriculum and curriculum policies are concerned with: what the changes in work and knowledge and technology in the twenty-first century mean for school curriculum (a new curriculum for new times?); which forms of assessment best promote student learning, and best promote quality outcomes (is assessment the tail wagging the dog?); how to develop curriculum given differences between students, not just of talents and interests, but of gender, cultural background, poverty and home facilities; how to drive growth in retention to the end of school and beyond (in particular, should we have different kinds of curriculum for different kinds of students?); and finally the issue of the growing accountability and management demands on education systems, the intersection of curriculum initiatives with politics, and the effect these have on how curriculum gets produced for schools—and how schools and teachers react to that.

By considering some of these genuinely difficult issues for curriculum making in terms of initiatives and experiences from different states over the past few decades, and hearing the stories of those who were involved, we can begin to appreciate the issue that is not necessarily visible in the debates about curriculum in the press: the complexity of how curriculum gets done, of how different interests get together (or fail to get together) and why the documents we may read are only a small part of the story. We can begin to appreciate why there may be a considerable gap between curriculum ambitions and curriculum practice.

Focusing on some examples of recent Australian initiatives and developments across the states in relation to curriculum is one way to understand what is at issue in curriculum making. We can see the way in which major social shifts (unemployment, globalisation), technical thinking about what works, and also values, politics, different beliefs about what matters, are all part of the curriculum terrain. But organising this book around state-specific examples was also done for another purpose: to try to get a better sense of state cultures and different approaches to Australian curricula prior to the current initiative to develop an ‘Australian Curriculum’.

The Australian states have different histories and vastly different geographies and demographies, and this has influenced the approaches to schooling each has developed. Different states have had different starting ages for schooling, different transition ages between primary and secondary and different ages at which students are permitted to cease schooling. They have issued different forms of final certificates, and have developed some different types of school (technical schools for example; or selective academic and other specialist schools). The school subjects offered in different states, and the topics and pathways of programs of study have had considerable overlap and commonality—but these programs and approaches have been far from identical between different states.² New South Wales continued to teach the subjects history and geography when other states moved to combine the two into ‘social education’. Queensland continues to manage year 12 and entry to university without having a final external examination, when in other states the fine details of the final examination have been the subject of endless scrutiny and fine-tuning, and one of the most visible forms in which curriculum and assessment are subjects of public debate. And while in recent years other states have moved towards locating their senior secondary curricula within common certificate frameworks, Victoria has moved to introduce alternative qualification options, with its VCAL certificate.³ Periodically over the years, politicians in the national parliament have taken up the cause of families who move state and face some curriculum change. Many parents, whether or not they move state, are puzzled about why we do not have a common Australian curriculum. (Although, it should be noted, neither does the USA have a national curriculum; and in the UK the Scottish curriculum has a significantly different history and form to the English one.)

As the new moves towards an Australian Curriculum are underway, it is timely to take another look at the states and their curriculum cultures. Everyone has their understanding of what is possible framed by what they have experienced. One of us studied in England in the 1970s, at the time when the tripartite secondary system was being turned into comprehensive high schools, and many teachers found it hard to conceive that it was possible to teach in a ‘mixed ability’ classroom—the only kind of classroom she had ever known in her own Victorian schooling. Another of us lived in Canberra at the height of its commitment to school based curriculum development in the late 1970s and watched ‘incomer’ teachers from every Australian state struggle profitably in staff meetings with each others’ alien convictions and experiences of what was both possible and educationally sound. And another of us studied the Victorian VCE in the early 2000s following the replacement of the radical common assessment task (CATS) system with a renewed focus on the external exam, and recalls the intense focus on university entrance scores still occurring today ahead of the conferral of the certificate. Some of the state differences that have persisted, including starting ages and the like, may well be mere contingent traditions, readily able to be changed once there is a will to move together with some commonality around the country. But not all the differences are of this kind.

The current book stems from a research project funded by the Australian Research Council that set out to examine changes in curriculum policy around Australia in the period between 1975 and 2005—to look at shifts over time, and also at differences at any one time between different states in their approach. The research project was titled School Knowledge, Working Knowledge and the Knowing Subject: A Review of State Curriculum Policies 1975–2005.⁴ The move to a new National Curriculum Board was on the horizon, and the intention in the project was to step back from the immediate discussions to get a sense of where we had recently been, of how perspectives on the overall framing of curriculum had changed over those recent decades and of what differences characterised the approaches of different states. The project focused on major reports and policies, and also used interviews. It was interested in what ideas or conceptions of knowledge were under-pinning various curriculum reforms; how academic compared with vocational purposes of schooling were being developed; how student differences were being addressed. Finally it was interested in how policies were balancing two central purposes of schooling systems today: the purpose of teaching things and developing young people in particular ways and the purpose of differentiating and selecting, particularly through final assessments and certifications. These purposes are not always in neat harmony and often not acknowledged simultaneously as central tasks for schooling systems. But in developed countries, one important curriculum agenda is always about what is to be taught, taking curriculum as a selection or construction of what is important that we set up to form our next generation.⁵ And another curriculum agenda (possibly not inevitable but in practice universal in Australia) is that schools are also required to participate in a competitive assessment of students to provide some pre-sorting of students for universities and employers.⁶

The background of this project was twofold. First, although there are exceptions⁷ we have generally had only the most limited and usually impressionistic sense of our own history of curriculum in Australia.⁸ Further, the studies we have are usually done within a state not across states; or alternatively focus on Commonwealth but not state developments. We have impressions of persisting different kinds of emphases in different states, and also of some broader waves of change when, say, there was a move towards comprehensive high schools in the 1970s and early 1980s, or the take-up of a Profiles approach in the 1990s, or the move to essential learnings and competencies around 2000—but it is extremely difficult to get a documented sense across the Australian states of what has been going on. In this project we wanted to look at major documents in the period 1975 to 2005 and get an overview, a sketch map, of what was being picked out as important in relation to our questions about knowledge, learners, difference, vocational and academic across states and over time.⁹

We also wanted to interview people in different states who had had some longstanding involvements with the school curriculum of their state. In some cases these people had worked in education departments and schools, sometimes in universities, sometimes in boards of studies (overseeing post-compulsory or broader school curricula) and often in more than one of these. This was intended to supplement our sense of what was happening at different periods; but also to give more subjective and reflective perspectives on what might be called the curriculum culture of that state. What did that state context tend to throw up as its important curriculum issues and agendas? How and by whom did curriculum policy get done? In this sense the project was also intended to provide further insight into curriculum as an arena of activity and inquiry.

In fact when we began this modestly funded two-year project, we found it was remarkably difficult to get this overview picture of the Australian states.¹⁰ Curriculum reports and documents do not always come out in the same form, and inquiries and new guidelines are not developed at the same time around the different states. Sometimes overall curriculum reviews are commissioned and a new reform put in place. Sometimes reports are specifically about the structure of the final school certificate, or about another particular phase of school—middle school for example, or early childhood. At other times there are specific inquiries on a particular subject area, or on girls or boys, or multicultural education, or indigenous students, with recommendations that add to or cut across the overall program. And while current documents and policies are now very readily accessible online, many states no longer keep good archives of past ones. However when we did visit the different states, to read their key policies, to interview those who had been involved in their state’s curriculum activities for a considerable time, we began to see some of the differences in values that had been building in those different contexts. When our interviewees began to talk about curriculum, they did not all start at the same point, or with a focus on the same kind of problem. Nor did the reports and guidelines that their state had issued. In some cases the ‘inclusion and retention’ agenda dominates; in others it is ‘standards and quality’; some have a history of valuing traditional forms of knowledge, or of valuing uniformity of provision; others begin with a more overt capabilities agenda, and believe in the value of devolved curriculum making and differences between schools and their programs.

With the establishment in May 2009 of a new national curriculum authority, the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA),¹¹ curriculum-making in Australia is, possibly, entering a new era. Nominees of state and Commonwealth government authorities and of independent and Catholic schooling groups are represented in this body; it includes an assessment and reporting brief as well as a curriculum responsibility; it has engaged in consultations with professional groups and with the public around the country; and the documents and forms that are to be an agreed template for curriculum in different subject areas around the country are under development. The Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on the editors
• Acknowledgements
• Part I—Introduction
• Part II—Envisaging a new curriculum for new times
• Part III—Who are the students—and should we have different curricula for different kinds of individuals?
• Part IV—When assessment comes into the picture
• Part V—The public management of curriculum and the story of curriculums that fall over
• Part VI—Conclusion
• Selected list of state and Commonwealth curriculum reports and frameworks
• Selected bibliography
• Index