Senior Secondary Curriculum in South Australia - A work in progress
A work in progress – Part 1
The task of making the senior years of schooling work for every young Australian has been seriously addressed by every education system in Australia… If there is a single message in the accounts of the reviews and the changes they triggered, it is that the task of making the senior years of schooling work for every young Australian is still a work in progress – and is likely to remain so for some time (Figis 2005)
Flexibility of the SACE: A Brief History
The period after the second world war, into the fifties and the sixties began a time of mass secondary education. Staying on at school and “Matriculating” was for a select few that were going on to university. The demand for more workers was filled by migration and the need for more white-collar workers created a demand for a more educated work force Leaving school for work was the norm, there were no “students at risk” because there was no compulsion or expectation that students would stay on at school. The only reason to stay on to year 12 was to go to university. The route to university was through the examinations controlled by the Public Examinations Board (The PEB), school assessment was negligible and subjects were traditional and academic.
In the early 70’s retention rates were growing, and a significant number of students were accessing year 12 who were not intending to proceed to university. This coincided with a turning point in South Australian Education. The Director of Education, Albie Jones, issued what became known as the “freedom and authority memo.” Which gave school principals the freedom to shape the school structures and curriculum to serve their community as long as that freedom was exercised within the broad policy parameters of the Department and Government.
From that pivotal moment South Australia developed an approach to curriculum and pedagogy to focus on social justice and meeting the needs of disadvantaged students by allowing schools and teachers a high degree of negotiation within the school about what should be taught and how it should be taught. Alongside the influence of the freedom and authority memo the school based curriculum development model owed much to both the changing times and number of key figures including Garth Boomer, as a public intellectual of the time.
“In South Australia, people who are professionally involved in curriculum tend to have at the front of their thinking students who are the traditional losers from schooling: part‐time students, poorer students. They try to develop mainstream arrangements that work for these groups” (Cherry Collins, Lyn Yates 2009)
As young people who were the traditional losers of school began to stay on past the age of compulsion individual schools began to develop courses to meet the learning needs of these students outside of the Public Examination Board system. The Education Department systematised these courses under a separate certificate, SSC became a parallel senior school track existing alongside PEB in many schools. SSC developed curriculum frameworks in the same subject areas as PEB but with a more student and often “job pathways” approach. As well as traditional subjects done differently English, Maths and Art- subjects such as PE and Drama found their way into the senior school along with new subjects that reflected broader societal aims such as Women’s Studies, Aboriginal Studies, and Politics. Teachers and schools developed new forms of assessment outside of the external examinations overseen by the PEB, school-based assessment followed school-based curriculum development. Within the subjects themselves teachers and students were given increasing ability to negotiate “projects” that allowed them significant control over at least part of the content of the subject. Semester subjects broadened the choice that students could exercise, and the short “registered” subjects gave away the need for any form of assessment and could cater for wide variety of teacher and student interest. The Senior School Certificate (SSC) was overseen by the department and it was the department that issued their own Senior Secondary Certificate (SSC).
From PEB and SSC to one certificate, The SACE
After a review into Senior Secondary Education (Gilding 1988 ) the SSC and PEB were brought together under the jurisdiction of the newly formed Senior Secondary Assessment Board of South (SSABSA) Australia and became part of a single higher school certificate the South Australian Certificate of Education (SACE). An important part of this amalgamation was that there would be one common certificate to mark the completion of schooling for all students no matter what their post school destination. Access to University was confined to specific subjects but the South Australian Certificate of Education would be “within the reach of all.”
The characteristics of SSC: local development of individual subjects, the ability of schools to negotiate content that met the needs of students and the place of negotiated projects within subjects became a defining feature of curriculum development within the SACE. Continuing the tradition of the SSC legislation allowed for the recognition and development of new subjects, by schools or other interested parties.
This came to a head with development of a program of studies, that were eventually named Community Studies. These subjects were developed Senior Secondary(2S) Project under of the federally funded Transition Education Project. The aim was to develop a curriculum to meet the needs of a cohort of students who were returning to year eleven and twelve in numbers that had not been seen before who were not going to access tertiary education