How to improve curriculum planning in schools

The Grattan Institute recently published an article on curriculum planning in schools, outlining workload challenges faced by teachers in the time taken to plan curriculum to facilitate student learning experiences in their classrooms.

A lack of detailed resources and direction for teachers has led to teachers having to create lessons from scratch and searching for appropriate materials or activities online to support learning. This often leads to variability between classrooms in what is being taught, and privatised classroom practice, which leads to students in the same year groups not having equal access to grade level content. 

Of the schools surveyed, the majority did not have robust curriculum planning processes in place, with only 15% of teachers having access to common materials for their classes – with teachers working in disadvantaged schools being half as likely to have access to common materials than teachers in more advantaged schools.

Having common materials has a significantly positive effect on teachers and teaching, such as consistent learning in classrooms, increased teacher collaboration, decreased workload, and greater satisfaction with their schools’ planning process.

The report outlines what can be done to ease the workload for teachers – which equates to 20 million teacher hours per year – by education systems investing in the creation of high-quality curriculum materials made available to schools and investing in developing deeper pedagogical content knowledge for teachers to create these materials. 

We are excited that two EDvance Alumni schools, Aveley Secondary College, and Serpentine Primary School, were recognised in the article as exemplars of curriculum planning and development and were able to share how they implemented low variability curriculum across their schools, and the subsequent positive impact this had on their teachers and student outcomes.

You can read the full report here.