Primary Teachers for London

Below is an extract from a letter I sent to all the schools who work with us to explain the CURRICULUM CONNECTIONS between the Uk and my home Education System (South Australia)

Extract from letter to schools:

We have returned from another Recruiting trip to Australia where we met teachers keen to come to teach in London. We will be travelling back to Australia in February, April, May, August and October in 2010 to continue to meet and vet potential teachers for London. Over the next weeks, we would be delighted to introduce some of these teachers to your school.

Our goal is to provide high quality fully vetted teachers to schools. Whether teachers have trained in the UK, or are Overseas Trained, the most crucial consideration for the students and school community is that every teacher can deliver the highest quality teaching and learning programs and use methodologies that promote and enhance students learning.

Curriculum Matters

Jim Rose wrote in the Independent Review of the Primary Curriculum; April 2009 that there was both consensus and connectivity between the New Primary Curriculum to be implemented in September 2011, and the curriculum taught in Australia and New Zealand. With the New Primary Curriculum being organised around 6 broad areas of study and having cross-curricular skills for learning means the similarities between the curricula in Australia, New Zealand and England has never been greater. Each country has broad areas of study and explicit cross-curricular skills to be taught in order for students to know how to learn not just what to learn.

In my previous life in as a Teaching & Learning Curriculum Consultant within the South Australian Education Department in South Australia I worked with school communities in South Australia, to organise, manage and deliver learning programs across areas of study. South Australia had 8 areas of learning and cross-curricula skills and understandings. I worked with school communities to develop and manage programs of learning that would provide students with access to a broad and balanced curriculum.

During 1996-7,the Executive Director of Curriculum in South Australia sent me to London to work with Fairlop Primary School in the Borough of Redbridge to investigate the ways the schools in England provided a broad and balanced curriculum. I found there were great similarities between both countries with the intent to provide a broad and balanced curriculum. There was great compatibility in content of the South Australian curriculum and the subjects of the Primary Curriculum in England. Both countries had identified the key learning outcomes to be achieved and specified the amount of teaching time required to teach the outcomes in each subject or area of study.

At that time, Fairlop Primary in Redbridge provided for a broad and balanced curriculum by dividing the curriculum into discrete subjects, and allocating a specified and required amount of time for the subject to be taught within the teachers program. This was to ensure the subject was covered and therefore provide the students access to all areas of the curriculum.

South Australia schools provided for a broad and balanced curriculum by separating the curriculum into two parts. The first part was the core areas of study English/Mathematics/Science which were taught in independent discrete learning programs. The second part were the remaining areas of study, which were taught through an integrated curriculum with specific themes or topics as the umbrella over the areas of study. It was believed that an integrated curriculum would enable teachers to maximise the learning time by organising teaching programs that covered a number of learning objectives from different areas of study at one time and gave the teachers time to support students to learn and use the cross-curricula skills. It also meant a number of outcomes could be learnt and assessed through one integrated learning program.

In the end, the decisions each country made to provide a broad and balanced curriculum were relevant to the context and needs of the Education Departments of each country. There were many similarities between both countries curricula content and learning processes when I visited in 1996 to 1997. Over the months of work there was a great exchange of ideas around curriculum content, learning methodologies and assessment processes between Fairlop Primary School and the schools in South Australia. As much as the schools approached providing a broad and balanced curriculum in different ways, both Education Departments felt they learnt many things from the other.

With the development of the New Primary Curriculum to be implemented in England 2011, Jim Rose has identified those areas within each countrys curricula that are now even more in sync and closely linked than ever before.

Regards

Bronwyn Ward-Manson

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