Australian Curriculum: English and C2C

An edited version of the letter below was published in The Courier-Mail on Wednesday 14 September 2016. The paper's heading was "Confusion with curriculum". Underlined words were deleted and those in square brackets inserted.

Curriculum confusion

Your editorial incorrectly implies [implied] that the English component of the Australian Curriculum currently contains eight units which are about to be reduced to six ("Curriculum changes a lesson in core learning", Sep 13).

This confuses the actual Australian Curriculum issued by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) with support materials produced by Education Queensland. The latter go under the name Curriculum to Classroom or C2C.

The ACARA document is not organized into units at all. For each year, it provides an overview called a level description, content descriptions and achievement standards. Arrangement of this information into units of work is left to systems, schools and teachers.

One of the problems with the way the national curriculum has been implemented in Queensland is that some teachers apparently think that the C2C units are the Australian Curriculum itself, rather than being just one possible set of support materials.

Garry Collins
Immediate Past President, English Teachers Association of Queensland