Curriculum in Practice is a research programme that sets out to explore the enactment and impacts of recent and ongoing changes to national curriculum, through a series of sub-projects. Three high-level research questions guide the direction of this programme of research:
- How are schools and teachers responding to the updated curriculum (and supports) and putting it into practice in diverse school contexts?
- How are diverse learners experiencing the curriculum?
- Over time, what impacts does the curriculum change have for student learning and other outcomes?
The first subproject was a literature review titled Curriculum change: Drivers of reform and teachers’ roles in curriculum reform. We reviewed literature on teachers’ and school leaders’ curriculum making in relation to “knowledge-rich” and “carefully sequenced” curriculum, and in contexts of high and low curriculum autonomy. We also looked at a selection of other jurisdictions to explore drivers of curriculum reform, Indigenous curriculum arrangements, and the emerging role(s) of AI in curriculum making. The report will be available from mid-August, 2026.
The second subproject explores primary teachers' and school leaders' curriculum sensemaking, as they work with the new English and Mathematics and statistics learning area documents, with further updated learning areas scheduled for release in the second half of 2026. This qualitative project will involve interviews with school leaders and teachers in 7-10 English-medium primary and intermediate schools, in terms 3-4, 2026.