ACARA responds to criticism of revised curriculum: podcast

The Australian school curriculum was recently reviewed in its entirety for the first time, with the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) releasing a new version 9.0 with the aim of getting back to basics, yet education peak bodies have been critical and believe it contributes to workload issues and teacher shortages.

“I'm not sure that I could actually absolutely claim that it caused an effect on teacher shortages. I'm extremely mindful that teachers are feeling an increased workload, but we have seriously set out to produce a curriculum that would be easy for the teachers to work with,” ACARA Curriculum Director Sharon Foster told Education Review.

The curriculum has been decluttered by 21 per cent, Foster said, making it much easier for educators to identify the essentials and in depth areas they'll need to teach, rather than feel like they’re trying to skate across the top of everything.

“We have also published comparative documents that show teachers exactly what has changed from one version to another.

“That will certainly make it much easier for teachers to look through that document and go ’all right, that's new content’.”

Foster joined Education Review to discuss the new version of the curriculum and how teachers can embed it, while also addressing the criticisms that have arisen after the review.