Unhelpful for students and for teachers

Imagine a classroom where the geography teacher wants to teach children the best way to drive from Melbourne to Sydney. Based on a syllabus approach to learning, where teachers have a clear, succinct and easy-to-follow description of what is to be taught, the exercise is straightforward.

A syllabus would provide teachers with an outline of possible routes to Sydney, for example, via the Hume Highway or around the coast, and there would be details of what all students should learn and what constitutes a pass or a fail.

During the 1990s, Australia ditched syllabuses in favour of outcomes-based education. With OBE, the focus is no longer on what is to be taught or how teachers teach. Instead, the emphasis shifts to what students have learned by the end of the process. The ACT curriculum describes OBE as:

Curriculum documentation has until recently concentrated on subject matter and teaching methods. This emphasis has highlighted what teachers do in the learning process. The move to an outcomes approach attempts to recognise the importance of what students know and can do.

Based on OBE, not only are teachers denied a syllabus detailing the best way to Sydney, but children negotiate their own way in their own time, and as long as they eventually arrive, whether via Perth or Brisbane, all are considered successful.

While much of the criticism of Australia's adoption of OBE focuses on the fact that stronger-performing education systems have a syllabus approach and that OBE has failed to raise standards, equally of concern is the detrimental impact OBE is having on classroom teachers.

Given the West Australian Government's intention, beginning next year, to extend OBE upward into years 11 and 12, that state has become a battleground where teachers associated with the website www.platowa.com have mounted a sustained attack against Australia's current approach to curriculum.

Indeed, such has been the hostility to OBE that a parliamentary inquiry has been established and state Education Minister Ljiljanna Ravlich has been forced into a series of embarrassing backdowns, including replacing the head of the Curriculum Council.

Since being established in June, PLATO has attracted some 450 members and the website's forum provides an illuminating and at times startling exposé of how educational experiments such as OBE make teachers' work increasingly difficult, frustrating and onerous.

One of the common complaints voiced is that by denying teachers a syllabus that outlines essential knowledge, understanding and skills related to particular year levels, teachers and individual schools are forced to spend valuable time reinventing the wheel by writing their own documents.

Primary school teachers, as they have to deal with a number of subject areas, are particularly concerned about the additional workload: a workload made worse by the fact OBE documents are full of hundreds of vague and fluffy learning statements that drown teachers in meaningless detail.

One practising teacher states: "Many of us have tried very hard to change our teaching and demonstrate more and more that we were implementing the department's dictates. That it has led to a disaster, gross overwork and teachers leaving (and planning to leave - I know of five in my school alone) is hardly our fault."

As noted in the debate concerning OBE assessment and reporting, where the assumption is that all students, given enough time and resources, are capable of success and the "fail" word is banned, teachers are also concerned that there is little motivation to excel.

At years 11 and 12, for example, instead of marking student work out of 100, the proposed OBE approach in Western Australia is to grade all students as being at one of eight achievement levels. The result?

One teacher notes: "To my mind, fine-grained assessments serve as excellent feedback mechanisms and lead to greater competition and student motivation to achieve their best. This is what would be denied in the WA implementation of OBE."

Criticism of OBE is not restricted to Western Australia. The Tasmanian president of the Australian Education Union, Jean Walker, has been reported as saying that not all teachers are happy with the adoption of the OBE-inspired essential learnings.

While Tasmanian Education Minister Paula Wriedt argues that teacher critics of essential learnings are old-fashioned and pass their use-by date, the head of the AEU suggests teacher critics span all ages and more would go public if teachers had not been gagged.

In NSW, the Vinson Inquiry into public education, on surveying teachers, found that many opposed the current preoccupation with outcomes as teacher workloads increased, learning was reduced to what could be measured and teachers' professional judgment was belittled.

It's significant that teacher complaints against OBE are supported by teacher academics. A NSW report undertaken by Professor Ken Eltis, of Sydney University, concluded that current approaches to curriculum lead to an "overpressured school day" and that teachers should be freed "to enable them to find time to pursue creative and innovative approaches to teaching, assessment and reporting".

After evaluating Australia's adoption of OBE, Professor Patrick Griffin, of Melbourne University, also concludes that OBE is flawed: "Perhaps OBE cannot be fully implemented system-wide. The changes needed are too radical and disruptive for whole systems of education to accommodate."

As important, if not somewhat ironic, is that the very education bureaucrats and curriculum designers responsible for imposing OBE on Australian classrooms have finally seen the light and admitted that teachers' misgivings are well founded.

An ACT report recently acknowledged: "Teachers had struggled with the volume of content they felt they had to cover." In Western Australia, a report evaluating the impact of OBE on teachers concluded: "Many schools and teachers are experiencing significant difficulty in engaging with the requirements of an outcomes approach."

Notwithstanding the millions spent developing curriculum over the past 10 years, those responsible for the Queensland curriculum also admit that teachers are correct in arguing that the excessive amount of material is "hindering in-depth learning" and there is "lack of clarity around what must be taught".

Indeed, such is the degree of self-criticism that those responsible for developing curriculum in Queensland are happy to admit that past attempts have failed: "For the first time, in Queensland's P-10 years [preparatory year to year 10] there will be rigorous, comprehensive assessment against defined standards that will be comparable across schools."

Finally, in Victoria, there is also a belated admission that not all is well: "It can be argued that the current ways in which many curriculum authorities have conceived the curriculum for schools have resulted in poor definitions of expected and essential learning and provides teachers with insufficient guidance about what to teach".

One might be forgiven for thinking, such are the acknowledged flaws in OBE, that those responsible would heed teachers' complaints, and as the teachers connected to PLATO argue, provide schools with clear, succinct and academically sound syllabuses.

This is not the case. Such is the bizarre and unaccountable world of curriculum development that the majority of Australian states and territories are renewing their efforts to develop more extreme forms of outcomes-based education.

In Tasmania, subjects such as history, mathematics and English have been replaced with vague and new-age essential learnings such as: "Thinking, communicating, personal futures, social responsibility and world futures".

South Australia defines essential learnings as "futures, identity, interdependence, thinking and communication" on the basis that "these understandings, capabilities and dispositions are personal and intellectual qualities, not bodies of knowledge".

As might be expected from the territory that hosts the nation's capital, the ACT, not to be outdone by Tasmania or South Australia, lists 36 essential learning achievements, ranging from the banal, "the student understands change", to the trite, "students use problem-solving skills".

As evidenced by the history of Australian education, the harsh reality is that, instead of being listened to, an increasingly frustrated and overworked teaching force is set for yet another tidal wave of jargon-ridden and time-consuming curriculum experimentation.