WA education: Secondary school maths curriculum review to boost attention for ‘poor cousin’ of reading

Just as WA maths teachers were preparing to teach new syllabuses from next year — four years after the last version of the national curriculum was endorsed in 2022 — Education Ministers from around the nation decided work would begin on yet another review. Deemed the “poor cousin” next to reading, maths has suffered from a lack of attention for too long, according to the authors of a Grattan Institute report that influenced their decision. That report claimed governments had been too slow to rule out “faddish, unproven maths-teaching methods.” Initiated on the advice of the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, the snap review announced just over a week ago follows long-running concerns about Australia’s poor maths results. According to this year’s NAPLAN results, after seven years of primary school, more than 11,000 students in WA did not meet grade-level expectations in Year 7 numeracy. And the latest Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study revealed 28 per cent of Year 4 students fell short of the national proficiency benchmark, even though it was Australia’s best performance in that year group. The review will target the first three years of school — pre-primary to Year 2 in WA — after teachers flagged concerns the curriculum was too complex and they needed more support. “How maths is taught is really important,” Federal Education Minister Jason Clare said when he announced the review. “It is cumulative. You learn it step by step.” Expected to be completed during the summer break, the review comes after the Grattan report released earlier this year called for more class time to be devoted to maths and better training and guidance for teachers to boost students’ results. Deputy director of Grattan Institute’s education program Amy Haywood said there had been a big focus in recent years on literacy. Maths was the “poor cousin” that had not received the same attention. “So it’s good to focus on maths,” she told The Sunday Times. “It makes sense to focus at the start of the curriculum, thinking about foundation to Year 2.” Ms Haywood said because maths was “relentlessly hierarchical,” if kids did not master basic foundational skills, it made it so much more difficult for them to learn other concepts later. “There’s some things we want students to be automatic in so they have enough brain space that they can then consider and tackle more complex tasks,” she said. “In very early years in maths, that might be something like being able to automatically recall math facts such as 10 plus 10 is 20. You want a student to get to the point where they’re so automatic they don’t have to think about it.” Ms Haywood said she hoped the review would also look at making some aspects of the curriculum more specific, because it was not always clear which content was mandated or optional. For example, it should be clear that students’ recall of maths facts should be automatic. “There’s some specificity that could be added to the curriculum that I think would be really helpful advice for teachers,” she said. “We also want governments to be really clear about what does effective practice look like. We know that if it’s new content in maths, we should explicitly teach it first and make sure it gives students lots of opportunities for practice before we then give them more of a complex task. “And we should avoid doing too many maths-lite games that actually crowd out the opportunity to make sure they’ve really mastered those skills.” She would also like to see the Australian curriculum benchmarked against international curriculums, to make sure students are taught similar content at the same stages as children in other high-performing countries. Mathematical Association of WA education consultant Kate Doepel said WA teachers would not be too concerned about the latest national curriculum review, with any changes likely to time to filter through. “The key to improvement lies not in rewriting the curriculum, but in supporting teachers to implement it effectively,” she said. “High quality teacher training, understanding of developmental progressions, and intentional play-based learning are what build lasting mathematical understanding.” Ms Doepel said calls to “get back to basics” could be misleading, because the basics were already central to the curriculum. “What’s needed is teacher confidence and deep pedagogical knowledge to teach these concepts through meaningful experiences, rather than by rote,” she said. “Research consistently shows that teachers are the biggest influence on student success. Investing in teacher capability will achieve far more than tweaking curriculum documents.”