Queensland’s new national curriculum has received widespread criticism at the annual Isolated Children’s Parents’ Association (ICPA) state conference and delegates are calling for its complete overhaul.
The peak lobbying group hosted its 41st annual state conference in Goondiwindi on September 18-19 which saw over 200 delegates from across the state gather to lobby for better educational rights for isolated rural and remote children across state schools, distance education and home schooling conditions.
The biggest issue on the agenda was the new Curriculum into the Classroom, also known as C2C, which was implemented into state schools, school of the air and home schooling environments at the start of the 2012 schooling year.
The C2C, designed by Education Queensland and the state government, was to be Queensland’s version of the national curriculum but it has far from delivered its promise.
New ICPA state president Andrew Pegler said there had been “universal condemnation” of the first troublesome units implemented in January.
“As delivery of the new curriculum was introduced too quickly, it has placed significant pressure on students and teachers at distance education schools,” he said.
“Many home tutors are experiencing ongoing problems with the quality and delivery of the material.
“The content and form of delivery are not home tutor or student friendly and the extra workload is putting strain on parents, most of whom are untrained teachers, trying to deliver the curriculum to their children.”
He said basic timeline issues were a major cause of the problem in that resources had not arrived on time, downloading the materials online was difficult and expensive on dial-up internet and there were a string of errors and mistakes in the units.
“There needs to be some form of quality control exercised,” he said.
“The way it was implemented - basically they (Education Queensland) had no hope.
“They brought in the C2C from prep to year 10, across 11 age groups, all at one time and there just wasn’t the time given to people developing the units, to come up with good usable workable resources.
“I really believe that we need a commitment from this government and from Education Queensland that when we start next year we will be starting with a properly resourced and a properly constructed curriculum that is age appropriate, that isn’t from full of errors and can be delivered on time.
“The current government has inherited one hell of a mess and as it goes on, they’re likely to be blamed for a portion of that mess. However they didn’t build it – they’ve only inherited it.”
Mr Pegler said teaching mothers with multi-age classrooms, and children in higher age classrooms were the most affected.
“We’re also finding that a lot of rural and remote kids have never had access to kindergarten service,” he said.
“You only had to go back a few years and less than 30 percent of four-year-olds in Queensland were in any sort of recognised educational program, as against 80pc in every other state of Australia.
“The national curriculum expects children when they start prep to be able to write in their first week, a rhyming sentence.
“Now our children, in general, are starting well behind the eight-ball because they haven’t had the access to the services.
“Some of these expectations need to be put more in line with what can be provided with the services at the moment, so we don’t have kids believing they’re a permanent failure.
“The whole system needs to be looked at, the timeframes and timelines, and whether it’s going to be effective. Or we’re going to end up with a generation of kids that hate school, hate education, and get so badly burnt by their educational experiences, they want as little as possible to do with it.
“We don’t want our students to have a second rate education.
“We want to be on par with the rest of the country but we need it delivered in a model that allows us to teach the same concepts and same facts in a manner that’s not going to be a major problem.”
“We’re at the cutting edge of the national curriculum in that Queensland implemented before any other state. So basically we’re the guinea pigs.”
He said the future of telephone services in remote Queensland beyond 2015 was also under question.
“While the copper wire phone network is to be maintained for the next 20 years, most members only have access via radio link services.
“They have been told those services have a very limited life expectancy and if replaced by a service delivered by NBN satellite, things like teleconferences will be very difficult. We need clarification on just what will be provided.”
The other issue high on the agenda was the need for more appropriately trained educators for special needs’ students in rural and remote areas.
