Not much logic in draft curriculum’s sheer amount of ‘knowledge’

2026-02-12 - 16:10

Opinion: A school curriculum that’s “knowledge rich”, delivered in a “logical order”, and “grounded in the science of learning”. That’s the promise of the Ministry of Education’s refresh of the national curriculum. But take a closer look at the draft curriculum released for consultation and you wonder how education will be improved. There’s no question a lot of ‘knowledge’ is covered in the material. Indeed, the greatest barrier to teaching the new curriculum is the sheer quantity of knowledge that students will need to learn each year. Across all subjects, content is divided into year levels – each packed with key’ knowledge’ that needs to be taught. For example, in the first year of schooling there are more than 80 learning objectives – covering knowledge areas and associated practices – just in the new maths curriculum. Add to this that an estimated 50 percent of primary schools have multi-level classes, which means teachers will need to juggle a set of knowledge with half their class and a different set with the other half. Previously, this could be addressed by choosing topics that could be studied by multiple age groups – but this won’t be possible now. Then there’s the ‘logical order’ problem. In the draft science curriculum for year 1, an example of the sort of knowledge five-year-olds are logically required to know is “Theophrastus (c.371–287 BCE) described plant forms and structures. His botanical texts were used for centuries as primary references”. Or we can look at the history strand of the social sciences curriculum. A (logical?) decision has been made to start in the distant past and then move forward. Under the title ‘The first humans’, five-year-olds will learn that “Homo sapiens evolved in Africa around 300,000 years ago. They used tools and fire and lived in groups”. I find it amusing that, in the same year, children will learn in maths “A sequence of events can be described using everyday language (e.g., before, after, tomorrow, yesterday, next, and last)”. If they are struggling with yesterday, how will they understand 300,000 years? The use of the term ‘science of learning’ in the consultation documents lends an authority to the proposed curriculum by associating its creation with the respected field of science. But let’s unpack the term. As the ministry’s website says, “The science of learning is the study of how people learn”. The science of learning tells us students learn best when they feel safe, when they are well fed, when they can connect their learning to their experiences and what they know, and when they have a chance to revisit previous learning to embed it in their memories. All of this is well known to teachers – it just has a new label. However, I question how these good learning and teaching practices can be put in place with the new curriculum as drafted. For example, in the two hours a week teachers will have to dedicate to the four strands of the social sciences, year 4 children (nine-year-olds) will learn (under the heading ‘Military and warfare’) the “importance of hoplites” and the “significance of key battles in the Persian Wars (Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis)”. While some students will have previous knowledge to which they can attach this new learning, it’s not obvious all children would. Likewise, in year 2, students will learn “materials take up space and have mass” and that “mass is the amount of matter present in an object”. I challenge you to take a minute to think about defining mass and matter, and the difference between them, to a six-year-old in a way that sticks in their long-term memory. Instead of delivering a logically ordered curriculum grounded in science, it would seem the new curriculum does the opposite. It is badly organised, illogical, and there is too much ‘knowledge’ – some of it random – for students to be able to build on their previous learning. So, what happens next? Luckily, the curriculum is still in draft form. The question for the ministry and minister is then whether they will revise these documents so that they are well organised and logical, or whether they will leave the country with something that is unwieldy and ultimately unworkable for teachers and their students.