Putting capabilities in a national school curriculum
A
national curriculum based on a set of capabilities for students in
schools across Australia that gives states and territories flexibility
in determining their own curriculum has been developed by researchers at
the University of South Australia.
The research around a national curriculum for the compulsory years of schooling was undertaken by Professor Alan Reid from UniSA’s School of Education, who was awarded a national research fellowship from the Department of Education, Science and Training.
“Various attempts to produce a national curriculum have been made over the last 40 years but invariably they fall over because states fear losing control of the school curriculum, which constitutionally belongs to them,” Professor Reid said.
“This constitutional control by states and territories has restricted the range of possibilities for national curriculum approaches. While the Federal Education Minister Brendan Nelson argues that, in an increasingly mobile society, students should be able to move easily from state to state and have access to the same subjects nationwide, the states and territories have rejected the current top down, exam and subject based approach because it threatens their autonomy in curriculum development,” he said.
Taking into account the challenges of the contemporary world and their impact on schooling, Professor Reid developed a rationale for a national approach to curriculum collaboration that goes beyond the traditional ‘railway gauge’ argument.
“We established a set of richly described capacities and capabilities at the national level that define what young people should be able to be and do at the end of their schooling. These include capabilities for participation in civic life, capacities for work, communication and more, much like the set of graduate qualities embedded in all UniSA programs,” Professor Reid said.
“This approach offers national curriculum consistency while allowing significant room for local interpretation and flexibility by states to design and incorporate programs within their own curriculum that develop these national capabilities in young people.
“It would give students moving from state to state access to a curriculum with consistency in its aims and goals,” Professor Reid said.
And instead of having the current standardised testing and literacy and numeracy benchmarking as a way of assessing the quality of Australian education, Professor Reid suggests that we might benchmark around capabilities.
He would also like to see national consistency achieved in the post-compulsory curriculum and recommends adopting an Australian Certificate of Education that records student achievement against the same capabilities at the end of Year 12.
“This approach would produce a seamless curriculum, with the post-compulsory phase commanding a greater level of complexity,” Professor Reid said.
“I would also like to see capabilities that go beyond the formal institutions of education to embrace workplace, community and recreational life. In a knowledge society, they are capabilities that need to be developed throughout a person’s life.