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SYDNEY - A REVAMP of education in Australia will see the launch of a new national curriculum in schools, with the government drawing on the success of systems in other countries, including Singapore.
At present, lessons in Australia's schools are operated on a state-by-state basis, with each state deciding on its own programme. The result has been as many as 18 different history and English courses being offered nationwide.
The national curriculum, due to be introduced in 2011, will make the same courses available in every Australian school. It will focus on the sciences, history and English, and will draw on the success of education systems overseas.
Education chiefs are said to be particularly impressed with Singapore's emphasis on science and mathematics and plan to pursue a similar policy in Australia. They are also believed to be looking at teaching materials from China, South Korea and Finland.
The Labor government's proposed national curriculum follows years of national debate on the issue and growing concern that the state education authorities have - from an ideological viewpoint - hijacked school syllabuses.
Critics claim this has not only led to the unnecessary and costly duplication of courses, but to a rise in the so-called 'post-modern' approach to education, in which examinations based on popular culture are given as much emphasis as more formal subjects.
Under Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's plans the focus will be on the sciences, history and English for all Australian pupils from kindergarten to the age of 18.
In maths and science, younger primary students will be required to understand multiplication tables and fractions, and scientific concepts such as gravity. This means they will have to start learning such topics at a younger age. In English, meanwhile, older primary students should have a command of basic grammar and spelling before heading off to secondary school.
It is a measure of past failures in these areas that has made it necessary for the government to list such goals.
Fundamental to this latest education initiative is the desire to save money and to make life easier for the 80,000 school age children who move to other states each year, often because their parents find work elsewhere.
A national curriculum will mean that a pupil moving between Western Australia, Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria will not be disadvantaged, Mr Rudd said.
The newly-appointed chairman of the Government's National Curriculum Board, Professor Barry McGaw, is known to be concerned about a slide in maths and reading standards among young Australians and wants greater emphasis placed on boosting the skills of high-performing students.
In a recent interview, he said there was too much concentration on improving the results of students at the bottom end of the performance scale and not enough on those at the top.
'It's perfectly true to say that we should be worrying about kids who don't get the basic skills,' he told the Melbourne Age. 'But if we talk as though that's the only problem, I think we begin to lose focus on the development of really high-level skills - they're the skills on which further learning depends,' he added.
He will spend the next three years determining what constitutes world class curriculums, before launching the Australian model.
rogmaynard@compuserve.com
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