Excellent NSW curriculum changes should be national

Reforms to the NSW primary school curriculum will help children who are struggling at school.

This clear and commonsense curriculum will change children’s lives.

Other states and territories must copy NSW’s A+ homework and simplify their own syllabus materials.

NSW’s gutsy reforms will take the guesswork out of schoolwork for students, teachers and parents.

The new syllabus shies away from woke and worthy lessons to focus on giving kids the knowledge and skills they need to grow into successful, educated adults.

One in three Australian kids is starting high school barely literate, having failed to grasp the fundamentals of reading and writing in primary school

This sets them up for failure.

For decades, too many Australian kids have been bored stupid – quite literally – because they can’t comprehend what they’re being taught in classrooms, or find the content dull and irrelevant.

Now NSW has delivered a succinct syllabus co-designed by classroom teachers, instead of ivory-tower academics who think “phonics’’ is a dirty word.

This new curriculum spells out precisely what children need to learn, using plain-English wording and practical examples. It is clear, coherent, carefully sequenced and far more interesting for inquisitive kids. Teachers will no longer have to stay up all night Googling definitions of education jargon, or swapping lesson plans on Instagram.

The scandal is that this fundamental reform has taken so long, and that so many children have fallen through the cracks of a flawed education system.