The Australian Curriculum underpins teaching and learning in all Australian schools and is reviewed every six years. The current Australian curriculum from Foundation to Year 10 has been in place since 2015, and over the past several months the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) has consulted widely with around 360 teachers and curriculum experts nationwide to inform a revised curriculum.
The aim of the curriculum review was to refine, realign and declutter the curriculum, so that it focused more on the essential knowledge and skills students should learn, and was clearer for teachers to know what they need to teach. 
ACARA released the proposed revisions to the Australian curriculum for public consultation on 29 April 2021. The curriculum released for consultation is broad and spans a total of 16 separate elements—eight learning areas, five general capabilities, and three cross-curriculum priorities.
Associate Professor Wojtek Tomaszewski and his team have been engaged by ACARA to consolidate and report the stakeholder feedback against each of the 16 elements of the curriculum released for consultation. Feedback is currently being collected online through separate surveys incorporating both quantitative (checkbox data) and qualitative (free text response data) approaches.
The qualitative responses are of particular relevance for the reports to be submitted to ACARA, and ISSR has partnered with UQ’s School of Education to develop a process that combines both inductive and theory-driven qualitative coding to enable richer and more nuanced perspectives on the data than is normally achievable through traditional approaches.
Accurately synthesising the public consultation information is time critical, and ISSR researchers are heavily invested to enable ACARA to meet the proposed release of the revised curriculum in early 2022.
TERM: March 2021 – August 2020
TEAM:
ISSR: Associate Professor Wojtek Tomaszewski, Dr Matthias Kubler, Dr Melissa Johnstone
UQ School of Education: Dr Kate McLay
