Back to basics in new curriculum: literacy and numeracy to the fore

FEWER subjects will be taught in primary school under sweeping changes to the national curriculum to be ­unveiled on Monday.

FEWER subjects will be taught in primary school and educational “themes” such as indigenous culture will no longer be applied to subjects such as maths and science, under sweeping changes to the national curriculum to be ­unveiled on Monday.

The Abbott government will release the report of its inquiry into the national curriculum, which will recommend changes to content and implementation, as well as its first response, which will be substantially favourable.

The report, written by academic Ken Wiltshire and education commentator and research fellow Kevin Donnelly, will recommend the primary school curriculum be slimmed down, with fewer subjects taught, but those subjects having greater substance and content. The government has been considering the report for several weeks.

It will recommend a much greater explicit emphasis on literacy and numeracy as the main goals of primary school education. The review will also favour more coherent and clearly understandable education objectives, rather than the existing woolly phrases such as creative-thinking skills and cross-cultural understanding. It will propose a content-based ­approach to education.

The review will address the place of the existing three themes in the national curriculum: sustainability, engagement with Asia, and indigenous culture. Under the plan announced in 2010 by then prime minister Kevin Rudd and his education minister, Julia Gillard, the national curriculum would incorporate the themes across the key subject areas of Eng­lish, mathematics, science and history.

For example, children in their first years of school learning arithmetic would be taught “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander methods of adding, including spatial patterns and reasoning’’.

It is believed the review will acknowledge the three themes have little or no relevance to studies such as mathematics and physics.

It will recommend dispensing with a good deal of wafty jargon that infuses the curriculum guidelines. To promote the theme of sustainability, the curriculum states that: in English, “the priority of sustainability provides rich and engaging contexts for developing students’ abilities”; and in mathematics, “sustainability provides rich, engaging and authentic contexts for developing students’ abilities in number and algebra, measurement and geometry, statistics and probability”.

Education Minister Christopher Pyne has said the fact the national curriculum is five years old but has been implemented only partially by a number of states demonstrates the problems with it.

The Australian has previously reported that there is some disagreement between Dr Donnelly and Professor Wiltshire over how much centralisation and com­pulsion there should be in the ­national curriculum.

The review contains many specific recommendations for changes in content to the national curriculum. These will be contained in a 300-page appendix.