Power walking on my last Tuesday at work before next week’s leave….  Dress – Boden, opaques – Mix, shoes – Rockport.

Because I wore them today just to make sure the random storm activity that’s hovering over Sydney at the moment didn’t catch me by surprise for the second day running.

But enough about the weather, my outfits and I.

Have you heard about the latest National Curriculum Review for Australian schools?  It’s been interesting reading and hearing about the recommendations as well as the way many in education seem to be in agreement about the proposals.  The direction education takes affects us all even if our own student days are ancient history.  Parents of students, employers, clients, the taxpayer who funds education.  One way or another, we all have ongoing ties to our education system.

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My own memories of primary school education revolve around Strand crayons which from which I graduated to Faber Castell pencils.  There was lots of reading from actual books.  And then there was lots of actual writing because computers weren’t in the classroom.

My early primary school teachers were Mrs Murdoch, Mrs Stanley and Ms Stevens (a trailblazer in our conservative neighbourhood with her mini skirts, boyfriend called Pete who happened to be a policeman and whom we met on school camp along with Ms Stevens’ mum who came along to babysit Keisha but I digress… I grew to love science because of Ms Stevens’ terrarium project using cut up soft drink bottles).  They were all firm but fair.  They’d go through our work with red pen, correcting grammar and spelling.  Encouragement or constructive criticism was given and then a golden peacock sticker affixed to the top of your page if it was particularly good.  And not everyone got a sticker.  And we all turned out all right.

From what I can gather, something changed in primary school teaching and the emphasis moved from phonetics and the three R’s to education based on themes and the curriculum seems to have gotten really crowded.  Effective communication didn’t seem to require correct spelling and grammar to be deemed effective.  Then NAPLAN came in highlighted disparities in numeracy and literacy across the nation that had some correlation to students’ socioeconomic status.  And then the 2012 PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) results hit the media and it found that Australian teenagers’ performance in maths, science and reading were falling further behind the results of South East Asian nations despite all the money being poured into the new curriculum.


Enter the 2014 review with Education Minister Christopher Pyne calling himself Captain Co-Operative in his goal of getting the states and the Commonwealth to work together to turn our education system around.  The key recommendations of this latest review aren’t ground breaking.    A move away from the themes (and the challenges of incorporating them into every subject syllabus) and a swing back to the basics of phonics and numeracy.  A decluttering of the range of topics and capablities that need to be taught, especially in the primary years to emphasize depth not breadth of knowledge.

Interestingly and somewhat controversially, there is also a call for the education system to show a greater emphasis and appreciation of Australia’s Judeo-Christian heritage.  In a time when we’ve made considerable progress in healing racial vilification of the past and are trying to calm the religious tensions of the present.

I’d love to hear from any teachers or other education specialists who may be reading this post.  What are your thoughts on the review?  What were and are your experiences with the current curriculum?  Will the proposed return to basics be more effective in equipping our children to negotiate study, work and life in general?  To compete at higher level in the global playing field that education seems to have become.


But most importantly, will the schools of the future teach Toddler SSG  really important life skills like:

– how to reset the work printer when it’s been off line for a day.  And how to clear the backlog of printing jobs by placing them in the printing tray rather than leaving them on the printer.

– the most efficient way of dividing a loaf of banana bread into single serve slices for the freezer?  Without a set of kitchen scales and with minimal mess or loss of baked good in the cutting process.