The Hon Christopher Pyne MP
Minister for Education and Training
Leader of the House
The Minister for Education and Training, the Hon Christopher Pyne MP, has welcomed new appointments to the Board of the Australian Institute of Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL).
“The Australian Government is absolutely committed to improving the quality of teacher training – the most important factor affecting student performance,” Mr Pyne said.
“AITSL plays a pivotal role in implementing the Government’s response to the Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group report Action Now: Classroom Ready Teachers.
“As part of the 2015-16 Budget, we are providing $16.9 million over the next four years to implement the Government’s response to the TEMAG report to improve teacher education in Australia.
News of changes in the school curriculum described in 'The Autralian':
School curriculum: spelling, writing back in fashion
THE AUSTRALIAN AUGUST 12, 2015
by Natasha Bita
National Education Correspondent
Brisbane
Students will spend more time learning spelling and handwriting in the new back-to-basics school curriculum prepared for state and territory education ministers.
The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority has binned convoluted sections of the primary school curriculum.
Schools will no longer have to teach seven-year-old children to “understand that language varies when people take on different roles in social and classroom interactions and how the use of key interpersonal language resources varies depending on audience and context’’.
Instead, Year 2 students will learn to use digraphs, long vowels, silent letters and syllables to spell words.
The cutback curriculum — ordered by federal, state and territory education ministers after an independent review last year — will focus on the basics of phonics, spelling and handwriting all the way through school.
The existing curriculum refers to phonics-based teaching only until the end of Year 2.
But ACARA’s draft revised curriculum states that phonemic awareness — the relationship between sounds and letters — must be taught until Year 10.
“From Year 3 onwards, knowledge about phonological and phonemic awareness will continue to be applied when making connections between the sounds in spoken words and the letters in written words,’’ the draft document, obtained by The Australian, states.
Children in the first year of schooling — known as kindergarten, prep or reception — will be expected to know how to write their name and spell simple words. The draft document has scrapped the existing requirement that kindy kids “explore how language is used differently at home and school depending on the relationships between people’’.
In Year 3, students will be expected to recognise most high-frequency words and know how to use common prefixes and suffixes. They will no longer be taught to “understand that languages have different written and visual communication systems, different oral traditions and different ways of constructing meaning’’.
Year 5 students will learn to write words that share common letter patterns but are pronounced differently, such as “your’’, “tour” and “sour”.
Teachers will cease teaching 10-year-olds to “understand that patterns of language interaction vary across social contexts and types of texts and that they help to signal social roles and relationships’’.
ACARA has also scrapped the requirement that Year 10 students “identify and analyse implicit or explicit values, beliefs and assumptions in texts and how these are influenced by purposes and likely audiences’’.
Instead, the Year 10s will deliver presentations by “speaking clearly and using logic, imagery and rhetorical devices in order to engage audiences’’.
