Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Education, Apprenticeships and Training) Share this | Hansard source

I am trying to help, as the member for Banks points out. It seems counterintuitive to some people that the opposition—particularly me, some people would be unkind enough to say—would try to help the minister. In the opposition we believe that it is better for the curriculum to be right than for it to be forced into schools unready. We believe that it is better to get the national curriculum right than to get it in, and we would rather give the government an opportunity to get off this hook and delay the national curriculum until January 2012. That extra year will prove crucial in ensuring stakeholder support for the national curriculum, state government support for the national curriculum and a much better outcome for the students from reception to year 12 through the introduction of our national curriculum, which the opposition supports in principle and, of course, which we initiated when in government.

The current minister for schools has picked up where the previous minister left off, but unfortunately she left him with a bugger’s muddle when it comes to the national curriculum. This is an opportunity to get him out of that muddle. You do not have to take my word for it. There are many stakeholders expressing very genuine concern about the implementation of the national curriculum. A letter to the minister in New South Wales on 22 October 2010, signed by groups such as the Australian Association for Research in Education, the Australian College of Educators, the Australian Council for Educational Leaders, the Australian Curriculum Studies Association, the Australian Education Union, the Association of Heads of Independent Schools of Australia, the Australian Primary Principals Association, the Australian Professional Teachers Association, the Australian Secondary Principals Association, the Independent Education Union of Australia, the National Education Forum, the Catholic Secondary Principals Australia and the Principals Australia Association—13 of them—said:

We believe that the timeline for the project must be extended to ensure that the Australian curriculum is as good as it can be. The timelines for all stages of the project at present are unreasonably short, and in the end this will be self-defeating. The consultation timelines do not allow enough time to provide considered, detailed feedback, and do not allow the voices of teachers and other stakeholders to be heard. The speed of the development process is contrary to what is known about the conditions for effective professional development practices and educational change. It was noted that schools require time for both evaluation of the curriculum documents after they are provided and planning for their effective implementation. This will also require an extension of the timeline.

That is point 2 of the document provided to the minister by 13 peak education organisations in October, all of them calling for the time line to be extended. This is not a group of people who you would normally find in the same room agreeing on educational policy. You would not normally get the Association of Heads of Independent Schools of Australia and Catholic Secondary Principals Australia as well as the Australian Education Union and the Independent Education Union of Australia getting together in the same room and signing up to exactly the same document without any qualification.

Nobody came out after this letter was published—not Angelo Gavrielatos, Leonie Trimper or anyone else—and said, ‘We’d like to qualify our signature on that letter.’ They signed that letter because they were genuinely concerned. We have comment from the President of the Mathematical Association of New South Wales, Mary Coupland, who said:

A lot of work needs to be done to make it anywhere near as good as what we have in NSW. I get a sense it is all being rushed.

Mark Howie, the President of the English Teachers Association of New South Wales, said:

A number of things create the sense that it is a backward step. It has an incoherent sense of learning.

Margaret Watts, the President of the Science Teachers Association of New South Wales, said:

We are very concerned and it may well be a step backwards.

So we have maths teachers, English teachers, science teachers and all of the peak education associations and unions in Australia begging the government to extend the time line for the implementation of a national curriculum.

All of this has been admitted by ACARA, the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority. They have accepted that there is consistent feedback highlighting overcrowding and that the draft curriculum was also found to be too difficult, inflexible and inadequate. The authority conceded that the suggested method of teaching grammar, vocabulary and spelling is out of sequence and needs revision to provide clearer and logical progression. They are still arguing over whether calculators should be used in grade 3 or in kindergarten. They are still arguing about the possibility of introducing consistent handwriting across Australia. They have identified a lack of continuity between the primary and secondary years, and language and terminology were found to be inconsistent. This is all in 26,000 submissions to the ACARA draft curriculum process, and ACARA have admitted that all of these issues need to be addressed in a very short time frame.

We know that the state governments are falling off the national curriculum faster than dags off a sheep, if I can put it that way. There is only one state—South Australia—that is in support of the introduction of a national curriculum in January 2011.

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