A Nationwide Approach To Education

Illawarra Mercury

Tuesday February 12, 2008

KATELIN McINERNEY

Plans to introduce a national curriculum for all Australian students in the key learning areas of English, history, maths and science have picked up momentum in the last few weeks and, as KATELIN MCINERNEY writes, the plan has its critics and its supporters.

The idea of a national curriculum is not a new one.

It has been kicked around the hallowed halls of Canberra for some time now, and was a prominent feature of last year's Federal election, as part of John Howard's push for "values based" education, and Kevin Rudd's "education revolution" .

Both sides of the political divide were keen to see a standard program of study implemented for all Australian students from Kindergarten to Year 12, and Rudd has been quick to get the wheels of his "revolution" turning.

The Prime Minister has said the standardisation of curriculum is integral to raising Australia's international competitiveness, and has promised school students will be studying the same curriculum in maths, English, science and history by 2011, regardless of their geographical location.

According to the Department of Education Science and Training, Australia has 34 separate organisations contributing to curriculum development and more than 18 different history and English courses.

Federal Education minister Julia Gillard has announced that a 12-member National Curriculum Board will be established in 2009 to draw together the best programs from each state and territory and forge a single curriculum "to ensure every child has access to the highest quality learning programs to lift achievement".

The man charged with the task of heading up the board is the director of the Melbourne Education Research Institute at the University of Melbourne Professor Barry McGaw.

The former Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) director for education has extensive experience with international education practices and systems and believes a national curriculum would raise expectations of students' performance.

"This is not uniformity for uniformity's sake - it is about raising our performance," Prof Mc McGaw said.

"We're a country of only 20 million people and we have eight different systems developing in some cases quite similar curriculum, and you could make an overall system much more efficient."

Comparative figures from the OECD show the academic performance of Australian 15-year-olds in 2006 had not improved from those of 2000.

"So there has been no decline, but we've slipped relatively because our competition hasn't been standing still," Prof McGaw said.

He said the results of Australian students at the lower end of the performance scale had not decreased. Rather, it was the students at the higher end that were lagging behind the improvement shown in other countries.

"In reading, there are fewer Australian students able to read highly complex tests compared to three or six years ago and that just makes it clear that schools have got to be focused not only on developing competence but developing high level skills,"he said.

Prof McGaw said that although the board would be considering the existing curriculum in all seven states and territories and taking the cream of crop, he would also be looking outside Australia's borders for inspiration.

"We won't just be looking at what is here already," he said.

"Finland is one of the really high performing countries that we will be looking at and we will be considering the reasons why places like Hong Kong, Korea and Japan are doing better than us in subjects like maths and science."

However, Prof McGaw was careful to point out that expectations of students should be appropriate and achievable.

"I believe this is a chance to clarify what students should reasonably be expected to achieve," he said.

The challenge for the board then would be striking a balance between curriculum content and skills development.

"The challenge will be identifying what content should be taught in schools and identifying what students should know and be able to do."

Prof McGaw said one of the key challenges would be formulating a curriculum that was engaging and relevant to all students.

"If we take the example of science, we know many students won't take science past Year 10, so for those students, the type of science we are talking has to be relevant and must equip them to be literate in the science of an adult society," he said.

"At the same time, (the curriculum) has also got to allow you to establish a foundation for those students who move on to become specialists in chemistry or physics, who use those skills as specialists in engineering.

"The curriculum needs to strike a balance between building competence for life and building expertise."

Precisely how a national curriculum would be developed is yet to be debated, but Prof McGaw said ideally he would like to see a range of expert bodies outside the education system involved during the consultation process.

"To take science as an example again, we would consult the Australian Science Teachers Association, which is the national professional body for science teachers, organisations like the Australian Science Education Research Association and of course the Academy of Science, because they are a good source of people to bring new ideas to the science curriculum," he said.

Prof McGaw said he wanted to see a national curriculum that was a constantly evolving program of study that would be re-visited, evaluated and re-worked if needed.

Prof McGaw said fears a national curriculum would be a rigid, staunchly prescriptive system were unfounded.

"We're not talking about a Napoleonic curriculum where every child in the country does the same thing at 10 o'clock in the morning," he said.

"I think objections to the notion that there will be a national curriculum seem to be based on a fear that it will be a hard, prescriptive curriculum but it doesn't have to be," he said.

"It could be no more prescriptive than some of the state's curriculums now that say 'these are the topics you should teach and these are the skills that students should develop and how you do that is a matter of professional judgement'."

Not everyone agrees that a national curriculum is the right way to go about raising standards and strengthening student performance.

Social commentator and former educator Ross Farrelly does not believe consolidating eight separate state and territory curricula into a single national curriculum is going to benefit students at all.

In an article for the Centre of Independent Studies called National Curriculum, A Bipartisan Bad Idea Farrelly argued that the current system had scope for competition, comparison, diversity and collegial exchange between the different systems.

He also stated that consolidating curricula under a single umbrella could result in a "monoculture in which there is a single solution imposed on every school in the country".

To show a national curriculum is not a silver bullet, Farrelly pointed to the disastrous implementation of a national curriculum in the United Kingdom, which has led to a decline in academic performance and is under fire from teachers who want to see it scrapped.

A joint enquiry launched in 1999 by several prominent UK mathematical bodies found a serious decline in students' mastery of basic maths skills and level of preparation for mathematics-based courses.

However, the Australian Education Union (AEU) is cautiously optimistic that a national curriculum could work.

AEU president Angelo Gavrielatos said although teachers were still unsure about what a national curriculum would mean on the ground, the initial discussion by politicians was promising.

"It has yet to be defined but so far we believe it largely reflects what has been happening already as Australia has been moving towards a greater national consistency in the area of curriculum," he said.

Mr Gavrielatos agreed with Prof McGaw's affirmation that any national curriculum would not be overly prescriptive.

"Its development will be evolutionary, and it will allow for degrees of flexibility to be able to reflect local and regional variations, which is a very sensible proposition.

"In fact it should allow for local variation in its development and implementation."

He did not agree with Prof McGaw that a national curriculum would raise performance standards as a consequence of raising expectations.

"Kevin Rudd said that a national curriculum would improve educational outcomes for students and raise literacy and numeracy," Mr Gavrielatos said.

"But a national curriculum in itself will not do that.

"A national curriculum may improve educational outcomes for students if its implementation is properly resourced, because unless you properly resource its implementation you will not improve outcomes for students."

Mr Gavrielatos said their other concern was that neither the Prime Minister or the Education Minister had committed to ensuring practicing teachers would be directly involved in the development and design of the national curriculum.

"Put simply, teachers are the expert professionals who have been trained to develop, implement and deliver curriculum," he said.

"To suggest that curriculum will be designed by people other than practicing teachers will result in a serious design fault and that design fault would be so great it would ensure that the whole enterprise would collapse."

© 2008 Illawarra Mercury

Back to News Index | Back to Home