Curriculum policy in South Australia since the 1970s: The quest for commonality.

The establishment of a new National Curriculum Board in 2008 (National Curriculum Board, 2008a) raises some important questions about what approaches to curriculum and assessment, what concepts of knowledge, what values, what approaches to students, have preceded it. With schooling formally a primary responsibility of the states, it is remarkably difficult to gain a comparative sense of approaches to curriculum and changes across the nation at particular points in time, and over time (Collins, 1995; Collins & Vickers, 1999; Cormack & Green, in press; Green, 2003; Harris & Marsh, 2005; Marsh, 1994, 2005). This article results from a project funded by the Australian Research Council that is attempting to initiate such an overview and to develop some sense of a map of curriculum policies and change across Australia in the period 1975 to 2005 (University of Melbourne, 2008). Our interest is not so much in the politics and manoeuvres by which policies are established or in the details of what is enacted in schools but in the conceptions and values that can be seen (comparatively) in the different Australian states at decade intervals from the mid-1970s to the mid-2000s. The project analyses key policy documents for each of the states and periods, while interviews have been conducted with curriculum leaders in each state who have had a longstanding involvement either in policy-making or department management or academic work in the curriculum area. This article focuses on one state--South Australia--but it is part of a larger project that is trying to understand the values, knowledge agendas and types of implicit common sense that have been part of our curriculum history in Australia and that are likely to continue to feed work on a 'national' curriculum.

The period from the mid-1970s to the mid-2000s has seen some large changes in curriculum responsibility in South Australia as in most Australian states. In particular, there has been a change from a school-based curriculum development regime in the 1970s (Jones, 1970; Karmel, 1971)--under which the South Australian Department of Education saw its task as that of providing resources and assistance to professionals at the chalk face (an input model in a devolved system)--to centrally specified lists of outcomes against which teachers must report student achievement (an output model in a centralised curriculum framing and monitoring system) (South Australia, Department of Education and Children's Services, 1995a, 1995b, 1995c, and subsequent South Australian documents). Attempts to move towards some national cooperation and uniformity began in the late 1980s, well before the new National Curriculum Board, as did moves to draw education into national productivity agendas. In this paper we focus on South Australian policy changes with reference to the 'what' of curriculum. We were interested in the values, conceptions and assumptions that the major overarching policies encapsulate, and with the approach to knowledge that is framed through these. (The paper is based on the general policy documents and arrangements made at that time, and on interviews with a number of people with long-standing involvement in South Australian curriculum policy. We have not attempted to look at particular subject areas or parts of the curriculum, or at the work that is primarily focused on assessment and university selection, and these are also an important part of the curriculum story of Australia.)

We argue that if our gaze is directed at the 'what' of curriculum, then the 'story' of overarching curriculum policy development across these years in the state of South Australia is, surprisingly, one of some dogged continuities. Most striking are three continuities: there have been a continuity of concern, a continuity of perspective and a continuity of task in the government school curriculum policy community in the face of all outside pressures. The concern has been largely for social justice and for how that might be progressed through the curriculum. The perspective has been consistently child-centred, rather than, for example, economy-centred or knowledge-centred. And the task has been construed, even at the upper secondary school level, as finding a form of curriculum commonality, a way of dealing with curriculum that is inclusive of all young people. The paper considers each of these continuities in turn.

The concern: Social justice

The South Australian Karmel Report (Karmel, 1971), which submitted its advice to the first Dunstan Labor Government in South Australia in a period of renewed power for the Australian Labor Party nationally, marked the beginning in Australia of a new kind of thinking about social justice and education. It argued that, because students did not arrive at school from the same backgrounds and therefore equally equipped to learn, the old-fashioned Australian aim of equality of school provision for all children was no longer adequate. Social justice demanded that schools either remove or compensate for disadvantage by the provision to 'disadvantaged' students of extra personnel or other appropriate resources. Resourcing policy should attend to need, not simply be based on a formula of equal provision. These arguments flowed through from South Australia to the national Karmel Report of 1973 (Karmel, 1973) and the Australian Schools Commission's founding of the Disadvantaged Schools Program.

Social justice was also the major argument used in the 1971 report's recommendation to dismantle the separate system of technical high schools for boys and girls, and in support of its recommendation to turn country area schools into full high schools (Karmel, 1971, pp. 182-97). On similar grounds, the report challenged the practice inside high schools of offering different tracks to students (Karmel, 1971, pp. 192-7): it pointed to evidence that the choice by families of technical high school education correlated with income levels rather than talent and had long-range consequences for students that were not fully understood by the school system's users at the time the choices were made (Karmel, 1971, pp. 192-3).

The freeing of schools and teachers to try new methods and curricula was in harmony with this proposed social justice revolution in schools. Local-level experimentation was in part advocated in school curriculum in order to find ways to make the curriculum work for all students whatever their particular background and local community (Karmel, 1971, pp. 503-26). Teachers were challenged to organise schools and to create curricular experiences that tackled issues of social division and disadvantage (Gill, 2007; Ebert, 2007). Many of these teacher professionals of the expansive 1970s later rose through the ranks to positions of leadership in the slowly shrinking school system of the 1980s and 1990s. South Australian policy documents over the next 30 years suggest that they did not change their way of seeing the task of schooling.

Over that entire time, there was only one serious attack on the tendency in South Australia for social justice concerns to frame curriculum policy. This occurred in the early 1980s, a period of Liberal state government, and a period that saw the beginnings of a serious decline in the South Australian economy, especially in its important manufacturing sector, and a consequent rapid rise in youth unemployment among early school leavers. The Liberal government commissioned an inquiry into education to consider, amongst other things, the challenge to schools that this posed. Its report (Keeves, 1982) proposed a return to centralised curriculum provision and hierarchical management. It advocated that two-thirds of the junior secondary curriculum be devoted to the traditional academic areas of languages, mathematics, science and social studies (p. xxxvii) and commented in relation to a proposal for greater emphasis on 'Environmental Studies' that:

The devotion of significant time to areas of the curriculum which do not have a substantial basis as an area of knowledge and human experience must have serious repercussions through limiting the time available for learning in areas that do. (Keeves, 1982, p. 31)

The Keeves Report returned to older ways of thinking about difference and inequality, suggesting vocational alternatives at post-compulsory level where students saw these as 'more relevant' (Keeves, 1982, pp. 135-43)--that is, aligning with older traditions of technical programs for working-class students--and saw gender as something that interferes with the choice of mathematics or science (Keeves, 1982, p. 137), rather than as something that needed to be built into a more 'inclusive' curriculum. The report also combined its curriculum recommendations with a neo-liberalism that would soon become familiar at the Commonwealth level of government at least: proposing statistical monitoring of school performance and a revolutionary devolved 'basket of services' approach to management that would dismantle central responsibility for maintaining even the fabric of schools.

This report caused consternation in the devolved school system (Ebert, 2007) but most of its recommendations were buried following a change of government back to Labor in late 1982. Jean Blackburn, one of the architects of the SA Karmel Report and deputy head of the Schools Commission in Canberra during the 1970s, vividly expressed the response of many social justice-oriented South Australian school leaders (Blackburn, 1982, pp. 7-8):

   Every presumed consensus of the Report endorses neo-conservative
   positions. Those who begrudge reductions in privilege and income
   for the benefit of others less well placed were on the outer in
   more prosperous times. They are now very powerfully backed.
   Individualism unfettered by social commitment has put on moral
   clothes and the Keeves Committee embroiders them ... The Keeves
   Committee makes no recommendations for the distribution of
   resources in ways which would positively discriminate in favour of
   schools serving poorer neighbourhoods ... it simplistically
   underestimates the degree of transformation required if 'working
   class' schools are to become the kinds of institutions in which
   students and their families find enhanced rather than diminished
   self-respect and confidence. Not even the 'basket of services' ...
   takes account of social differences.

The concern about social justice rose rather than diminished in South Australia under the state Labor governments of the later 1980s, even as the South Australian economy continued to deteriorate. In 1989, this commitment was made concrete in the government's Social Justice Strategy (South Australia. Department of Premier and Cabinet, 1989), and this in turn became a reference point for curriculum policy. The 1990 charter Educating for the 21st century (South Australia. Education Department, 1990) listed 'Enact principles of social justice' as one of its five major commitments, carefully setting out in five points exactly what that meant. The points included the following:

* Recognise, affirm and actively support all students' equal entitlement to the knowledge and skills that are valued in our society

* Ensure that allocation of resources, teaching methods and styles of assessment and reporting will secure the successful participation of all students. The 21st-century's South Australian curriculum standards and accountability framework (SACSA) reiterated the theme, including equity as one of its five focuses, together with an 'Equity cross-curriculum perspective' that 'places at the heart of the curriculum the knowledges and cultures of those groups which traditionally have been marginalised' (South Australia. Department of Education, Training, Employment and Catholic Education, 2001a, p. 10).

This last commitment to teaching 'the knowledges of the traditionally marginalised' has a long-standing heritage in South Australian documents. The 1971 Karmel Report had referred to cultural pluralism and the need to lead students to an 'appreciation of their normality without disparagement or criticism' (Karmel, 1971, p. 33). A raft of advocacy policy documents in the years that followed, included Diversity and cohesion (1982), Equal opportunities for girls (1983), Sexual harassment (1984), Languages (1985), The education of girls (1986), Anti-racism (1990b), Multiculturalism in schooling and children's services (1990c), Students with disabilities (1991) and Aboriginal education operational plan (1992). All these documents included matters of curriculum policy and, as time wore on, later policies moved towards approaches in which 'identity politics collided with poverty intervention' (Thomson, 2002, p. 174).

The perspective: Child-centred individualism

The 1971 Karmel Report proposed replacing what it saw as a tradition of uncaring imparting of information from the teacher to whole classes of children with a caring commitment to the educational development of the individual child. How to make schooling a positive educational experience rather than an undermining experience for each and every child was a popular theme of the time. The devolution of curriculum responsibility to schools, while resonating with social justice concerns, was most directly generated by this child-centred perspective: teacher dedication and experiment were required to devise ways in which classes could be transformed into child-centred environments filled with self-motivated, developing learners. Social justice itself was largely seen as a matter of dealing with the individual background and learning needs of each child.

In the departmental policy that followed the Karmel Report, the child-focused rhetoric became even more pronounced than in the report itself. The department reduced the rich, rather democratic-socialist tone of the report into a list of what schools should 'assist every child' to 'acquire'. In summarising the report,Alby Jones, the Director General of Education in South Australia, pulled out six qualities: openness, a non-authoritarian approach, decentralisation, diversity, equality of educational oppor-tunity and 'a concern for the individual child, which I believe is one of the important strengths of South Australian teachers' (Jones, 1972, p. 56).

The child-centred curriculum persisted in South Australia right through the policy turn to centralised accountability in the late 1990s. Child-centredness was never simply progressivism in the sense of a belief in laissez-faire classrooms in which children are given resources and space in which to make their own choices about learning. Indeed, from Karmel's concern that the school system should take responsibility for ensuring that schools achieve the system's curriculum purposes (Karmel, 1971, p. 504) to South Australia's recent leading work on explicit teaching (for example,Teacher Research Literacy Clearing House, 2008) there have been clear curriculum goals and defined roles for teachers in achieving them.

How then to characterise the South Australian child-centred focus? First, it has been a commitment to being on the side of the child (or of the older student) as a person. It was visible for example in the recommendations of the Gilding Report which, in the late 1980s, recommended that its new post-compulsory certification system should have no time limits and that part-time study and the return to school of adults (and the provision of creches) should be treated as a normal part of schooling (Gilding, 1988, pp. 60-1). It was evident, perhaps most surprisingly, in the South Australian Junior Secondary Review of the early 1990s (Eyers, 1992) at the height of the national push for tougher education for the clever country. In that review, the case for a child-centred developmental approach to the junior secondary school or middle school was fervently argued.

Second, there has been a commitment to a view of education as an enterprise that starts from the child, not from the 'needs' of the nation or community, nor from a view of schools as the transmitters of important knowledge across generations. In this child-centred perspective, learning is thought of developmentally, as building through the child's efforts to make sense of things: this approach is seen, for example in the 2001 Curriculum standards and accountability (SACSA) framework and its explicit espousal of 'constructivism', a cognitivist developmental approach to learning (South Australia. Department of Education, Training and Employment, 2001, pp. 10-12). Possibly the most influential and distinctive incarnation of the child-centred developmental approach was seen in the work on the National Statements and Profiles produced in the early 1990s, the brainchild of Garth Boomer, a South Australian curriculum leader and widely acknowledged in our interviews in other states as one of the most influential curriculum leaders this country has produced.

Pressed by the Commonwealth towards testing regimes and an outcomes-explicit curriculum, Boomer led a national effort to write curriculum frameworks that would not only accommodate the politically demanded capacity to report levels of student achievement but that would also set out the curriculum as a set of self-paced developmental paths along which teachers would coax individual children (Marsh, 1994). When, in 1993, each state had to decide whether to adopt the national statements and profiles, South Australia was already well on its way to using them. Policy-makers in South Australia saw them as their own (Dellit, 2007).

The task: Finding a form of curriculum commonality

The concern for social justice and the steady child-centred perspective have supported in South Australia a particular construction of the curriculum policy task in relation to the secondary school curriculum. Under this construction, the curriculum has been seen, from the 1970s to the present, as a site of struggle towards the inclusion of all students and the defeat (or, if that is not possible, the disguise) of the stratified curriculum. There are intertwined threads: a commitment to commonality in curriculum for all students, a bias against the academic curriculum and, following on from these two givens, a long effort to find a new common curriculum 'core', even for post-compulsory schooling.

The recommendation in the 1970s to close the technical schools and to move all students into common secondary schools raised an inevitable question about what the new comprehensive secondary school was to be about. What were its students going to learn? The Karmel Report had acknowledged that schools served purposes both of initiation and of social stratification but optimistically argued that the selection purpose evident in the stratified curriculum was on the point of fading out at the secondary school level:

[As industrial societies like Australia] move towards highly developed technology ... selection becomes a less important function of schools, tending to be deferred to post-secondary levels. The demand for minimally educated labour falls off, hours of work are reduced and the complexity of social issues requires high levels of general education in the community (Karmel, 1971, p. 188).

While the prediction of the need for high levels of general education has undoubtedly been fulfilled, most of the rest of this prediction has proved a utopian fantasy. In fact, competition at the end of schooling for places in elite university faculties, along with social stratification itself, has deepened.

Yet the utopian vision, rather than the reality, has framed South Australia's secondary school policy documents for a generation. Except for the Keeves Report, policy has tried to undermine or to downplay the selection process. In the overarching policy documents there has usually been a strong emphasis on commonality and on how to provide and to certify common curriculum ends. A standard approach to discussion of the curriculum in most major curriculum policy documents in the period we have been studying has been to set out what the curriculum needs to achieve for, or requires of, all students. These documents have tended to consider overarching curriculum 'purposes', with an implicit assumption that the purposes are the same for all children. They have skipped any discussion of what knowledge beyond that might be important and for whom. The 1971 Karmel Report described the curriculum in terms of 'certain basic skills which for one reason or another are required by all citizens in their daily lives in our society' (Karmel, 1971, p. 31) and talked of the school's purpose as 'provid[ing] these skills to as high a standard as the ability of the individual child allows'. It went on to list the skills it had in mind: the ability to acquire information, the ability to communicate information, the ability to handle simple mathematical operations, some scientific understanding of the environment, some elementary skill in self-expression in some of the arts, the ability to reason with simple logic and the ability to look for and recognise evidence. Then it moved on to other matters. There was no discussion of 'the more advanced skills and abilities' it acknowledged at one point, or of any purposes of schools beyond what all children should learn in common.

Common curriculum frameworks

In 1981 a new way of thinking about commonality emerged: the idea of a curriculum framework, a setting out of categories of what all children should commonly learn without specifying the substance in the way that syllabuses had previously done. The framework idea was put forward in the Department of Education's policy and public relations document Into the 1980s (South Australia, Department of Education, 1981). The new common framework was to consist of eight curriculum areas: environmental education, health and personal development, human society, language studies, mathematical studies, science and technology, the arts, and the newly conceptualised field of transition education (aimed at grooming the school leaver for the search for work in grim youth unemployment times). Another decade on, the charter for public schooling Educating for the 21st century (1990) continued with the framework form of commonality, but set out seven rearranged curriculum areas. By 1995, these had morphed into the eight key learning areas (KLAs) laid out in Boomer's national curriculum framework exercise: English, languages other than English (LOTE), mathematics, sciences, society and the environment (SOSE), the arts, health and physical education, and technology.

The national framework of the 1990s brought in a much more detailed and complex construction of commonality: Boomer's idea of profiles, of common pathways of learning. Each student was expected to conquer, over the compulsory years of schooling, a set of some two dozen pre-specified knowledge 'paths' through six levels (originally eight) of pre-specified achievement outcomes in each path. There was a separate outcome path in three to five strands in every one of the eight curriculum areas. These 'developmental' paths, written to be acceptable across all states, tended to be thought of as the building of cognitive and other skills rather than as the mandating of any particular content knowledge (Collins, 1994).

The search for a non-academic 'common' curriculum experience

The ending of separate vocational and academic high schools involved, in South Australia, not just the merging of the vocational into a larger view of education but also the search for a kind of education that was not primarily 'academic'. The idea of academic knowledge was linked to the process of matriculation as in all Australian states, and that process had a particularly hard edge in South Australia, where, from the early 1960s on, the Public Examinations Board, which controlled matriculation on behalf of the University of Adelaide (and later all South Australian universities), had set out strict criteria regarding what was required for a subject to be suitable for matriculation (Mercurio, 2003, p. 122). Subjects that were not academic or theoretical (such as arithmetic, drawing and bookkeeping) or that were directed towards a particular occupation (agricultural science) were specifically excluded. In consequence, the range of subjects that those students wanting tertiary entrance could study at post-compulsory schooling level hardly grew in more than 30 years, apart from the addition of a plethora of community languages. The strict criteria lasted until 1995 when the University of South Australia broke ranks and announced an array of new subjects that it was prepared to consider for tertiary admission.

In direct contrast with this obsession with academic criteria and elite knowledge, professional school system policy-makers, in both the Department and the Senior Secondary Assessment Board of South Australia, can be seen to have embarked on a generation-long campaign to find something other than academic knowledge around which to build a common curriculum. They attempted over and over again to set in place a new central knowledge task for the secondary school, to find a form of knowledge that would be powerful for young people in a changing world but which would be available to all, and do-able by all, rather than, as they saw it, excluding and elitist.

Karmel had a first attempt at this task and the Karmel Report pointed towards future attempts in a number of ways: an emphasis on skills rather than content knowledge; a prediction of the end of lifetime careers and of the need for self-confidence and an enjoyment of learning that would lead to lifelong learning; and the importance of helping students to analyse their strengths and weaknesses in order both to both know themselves and become resilient (Karmel, 1971, pp. 29-35). A decade later, Into the 1980s (South Australia. Department of Education, 1981) had integrated these themes into a view of schooling as a form of mentored self-development. The curriculum aims were intended to have students develop certain 'powers' ('lively' enquiring minds, the ability to think rationally, imagination, creative self-expression, judgement); certain attitudes to self and the world (willingness to apply effort to worthwhile tasks, self-confidence and a sense of worth, a 'coherent'--but unspecified--set of personal values); and certain skills (decision-making and problem-solving skills, competence in intellectual, social and physical skills, and skills--again unspecified--relevant to adult life and employment). Only one aim could be interpreted to be even partially unrelated to self-formation, the vague aim of developing 'an understanding of themselves and their world'. Mandated 'expectations' showed a loss of any defensible sense of content knowledge purposes. Instead there was an apparent conviction that the educational process must be focused on the self and must consist primarily in directly instrumental learning. It was about creating a functional rather than a knowledgeable person.

This focus at policy level did not mean that subject-based knowledge died out. Secondary teachers continued to be trained to teach academic subjects, to belong to academic subject associations and to be appointed, in most schools but not all, to academic subject departments, although the new move into framework curricula in Into the 1980s resulted in some reorganisations and new cross-curriculum identities. Yet the fact is that central curriculum policies addressed themselves consistently to proclaiming that the curriculum was not primarily about such knowledge. Indeed, Into the 1980s argued-displaying again, in the process, the Australian positivist assumption that construes disciplinary knowledge as items of information--that there had been a 'knowledge explosion' and therefore, with regard to knowledge in the curriculum 'to some degree any selection is arbitrary' (South Australia. Department of Education, 1981, pp. 16, 18).

The move towards personal functional knowledge became more clearly formed and better articulated in the mid-1980s. In Making Things Work (Gilding, 1986), a report on technology and education, Kevin Gilding considered the issue of defining a different goal for school learning than academic content knowledge. He argued for a focus on 'autonomous learning', the meta-knowledge of learning how to learn for yourself and of how to self-start in making use of skills and knowledge, which had value--to Gilding--primarily in their use.

In his first report on post-compulsory schooling, Gilding (1988, p. 41) pointed to the overwhelming view of submissions that content-based learning and assessment (the whole approach of publicly examined matriculation subjects) were no longer appropriate for post-compulsory education, and he called for 'competent curriculum developers' to identify a range of 'essential learnings'.

The focus on skills and processes as essential learning fed into the national economic agenda for education and returned to South Australia, as to all states, in a mandated list of key competencies, the result of the national Mayer review (Mayer, 1992). The concept of employment-related key competencies and the Australian list of them, mirrored similar lists in the UK and the USA. They were a wish-list of what employers were judged to want new employees to be able to do. Context-free competence of this generic kind--for example, generic 'problem-solving' Competence--is often actually unteachable, a conclusion endorsed by the first discussion paper issued by the new National Curriculum Board (National Curriculum Board, 2008) and reflected an overreach into the schooling arena of economic policy-makers' yearnings about ideally functioning employees (Collins, 1993). Key competencies were explored in South Australia, mandated in a halfhearted way for about a decade, and then lost impetus.

But the idea of the skills and processes curriculum rather than the content-filled one continued to be central to curriculum work. It was basic to Garth Boomer's national profiles, adopted in South Australia from the mid-1990s, and, through that source, colonised all curriculum areas to Year 10. As we have noted, profiles tended to be written in terms of cognitive, procedural know-how, what students could demonstrate that they could do, rather than in terms of any particular content. South Australia's own South Australian Curriculum Standards and Assessment Framework (SACSA), which replaced the Statements and Profiles in 2001 and which was largely written by subject associations in South Australia, has retained the view that the curriculum framework sets out what children are expected to learn to be able to do: investigate, analyse, explore, recognise, suggest and justify reasons, and so on. In most parts of the curriculum outside mathematics and science, teachers are free to choose the particular content and materials through which they will develop children's functional capacities.

Within this broad turn away from content and towards skills, central curriculum policy has focused on defining an overarching sense of the common point of it all. Increasingly this has come to mean the development of common, useful 'capabilities'. In spite of intense Commonwealth pressure in the late 1980s and early 1990s, these capabilities have never, in South Australia, been seen as useful purely in economic terms. Even under pressure education policy remained faithful to its focus on the best interests of students--its child-centredness--and to educating towards a democratic and just social vision.

The charter of 1990, Education for the 21st Century, was a pioneer in the language of capabilities. Its list of curriculum outcomes not only acknowledged economically desirable capabilities--'show enterprise, exercise judgment and initiate action in unfamiliar and demanding situations'--but also included outcomes well beyond the national 'clever country' focus of the late 1980s. If anything, it emphasised the usual South Australian concern for the individual child and his or her personal functional capabilities: 'show a well developed capacity to protect themselves', for example. Other outcomes related to individual control, including being able to self-manage physical and emotional health; having a commitment to lifelong learning; having the capacity to evaluate and analyse one's own achievements; being confident; and being determined. The charter also considered communitybuilding and democracy-building outcomes: 'make positive contributions to the community and have confidence in using community resources' and 'exercise the democratic rights and meet the obligations of Australian and global citizenship', to give two examples (South Australia. Education Department, 1990a, pp. 7-8).

The attempt to define core capabilities has continued into the 21st century. It has been a particular focus of Alan Reid, Professor of Education at the University of South Australia, who was directly involved both in the shaping of the SACSA framework in 2001 (South Australia. Department of Education, Training and Employment, 2001) and in the review of the South Australian Certificate of Education published in early 2006 (Crafter, Crook & Reid, 2006). SACSA set out five core capabilities, which were actually labelled with Gilding's term 'Essential Learnings' (a term also being used in other state policies by this time), and which targeted capabilities relevant, respectively, to futures, identity, interdependence, thinking and communication. Crucially, in the SACSA, these 'Essential Learnings' are no longer understood as independently learnable generic skills, in the way they were envisaged in the key competencies, but rather as situation-specific capabilities learnt through the coordinated interaction of particular knowledge, skills and 'dispositions'.

The search for commonality, a curriculum for all, is also evident in the South Australian struggles with a form for the final school certificate. After the ending of technical schooling in the early 1970s, South Australia offered three kinds of courses at the post-compulsory level, with clear status differentiations. From the early 1970s, there was a struggle to merge the different types of courses and, when that failed, to blur distinctions between matriculation and non-matriculation courses. A number of inquiries were set up, and in 1983, a new Senior Secondary Assessment Board of South Australia (SSABA) was established, formally bringing all courses within its ambit. For a while two parallel structures remained within it but, in the early 1990s, these were incorporated, after the Gilding reports, into a single Year 12 certificate marked by commonality of course pattern: 'a coherent, coordinated set of experiences across the 2 year program' (Gilding, 1988, p. 23). The South Australian Certificate of Education was said to be 'within the reach of all appropriately prepared students who are willing to make a serious attempt' (Gilding, 1989, p. vi).

In reality the South Australian Certificate of Education put in place an elaborate set of common requirements, a mask of commonality across a system in which there was still in fact a differentiation between approved subjects for tertiary entrance and those that could not be used for tertiary-entrance purposes. By 2005, the alarming statistics of declining numbers of students completing the South Australian Certificate of Education forced a wide-ranging review. That review (Crafter, Crook & Reid, 2006) made clear that the elaborate structure aimed at a 'common' post-compulsory schooling pattern had instead perpetuated a clear distinction, by social class background, in the pattern of subjects taken. The solution put forward in the review, and currently being worked through, was to remove the pattern of studies, introduce the notion of credits, and turn post-compulsory schooling into an 'open space' in which students could obtain credits from a variety of sources. These sources would include vocational education and training (VET), the local school, and online courses from interstate and overseas. SSABSA would act as an accrediting agency for such courses, deciding on their credit value as well as continuing to offer its own courses.

At first glance, this proposal could be interpreted as an abandonment of the search for commonality of study at post-compulsory level in favour of individualised pathways: the individualist perspective breaking free of the social justice concern. Alternatively, the new proposal might be seen as the old South Australian ingredients in a new mix. There is a continued commitment to maintaining commonality of certification at all costs. Second, and most significantly, a common core has been proposed, and that common core has been thought of in terms of capabilities. The development of capabilities by all students is intended to be in five areas: communication; civic participation; health, well-being and personal development; work; and knowledge work. A self-management focus is emphasised through a proposed compulsory unit in which students must develop a personal learning plan (PLP). Thus even in the proposed new Certificate of Education--in which the old Certificate of Education pattern of studies is to be replaced with the concept of an 'open space' where students are free to choose very differently constructed courses from a wide variety of sources-a core of commonality is still strongly present. Moreover, that commonality follows the South Australian path away from academic content knowledge towards personal functional knowledge. Further it maintains a student-centred perspective both in the capabilities themselves and in the personal learning plans. The vision of setting each and every individual student on his or her feet-social justice as individual, instrumental development for everyone-is still as evident as ever.

Conclusions

This paper has attempted to describe some continuing themes in the 'culture' or 'common sense' of South Australian curriculum policy since the 1970s, particularly as it has related to the secondary school. Our focus has been on the 'what' of the major policy statements; a perspective that attempts to stand back from the events and specific contexts that accompany each change as one means of seeing some agendas that permeate the taking up of curriculum policy questions.

At the same time, we are conscious of what we have left out, and of what larger historical projects might investigate further. There is nothing here directly on the programs that followed from the policies we examine, and still less on Commonwealth policies and programs that interwove with state policies and

programs at the local school level. Just as importantly, there is no discussion here of why the particular emphases we have described are so striking in South Australia. A list of what would need to be weighed here would include the economic difficulties of the state and the consequent downturn in student numbers as well as spectacular rise in youth unemployment in state schools catering to the 'rustbelt' manufacturing areas. It would need to examine the effect on state schools and their policy-makers of the expansion of the independent school sector and the opportunities to bypass the state certification system with the introduction of the International Baccalaureate in a number of independent schools. The existence of a flourishing private school sector may also have resulted in a certain residualisation of the state system, and thus might partly explain South Australia's emphasis on social justice and its reaction against the academic curriculum. An attempt at explanation would also need to look at the relative insularity, common history as teachers in the 1970s, and camaraderie of South Australian school system policymakers, particularly below the very top level. Perhaps, as that generation retires, we will see a different culture and different policy emerging.

But we have begun in this paper to set out some of the story of what has been happening over the past few decades in one Australian state. It is an initial story from a project that is interested in gaining some perspective on our recent history and cultural agendas across and between states, as well as in the decades that have preceded the current move to a National Curriculum Board. Are the assumptions that have fed different states broadly similar or different? Some of the shifts over time we have described here in the case of South Australia have recognisable echoes in many other states but how significant are differences in the values and experiences that each state foregrounds in these discussions and in the leaders and networks they give rise to?

The concerns about commonality, about social justice, and about the individual and his or her needs, seem in South Australia to have moved curriculum thinking in a particular direction--one in which disciplinary knowledge, for example, is left outside the main frame--and in which, to some extent, the issue of how 'areas' or KLAs or even capabilities come to be designated, and by whom, is not explicitly part of the policy discussion. But the extent of that emphasis, the extent to which it is possible (or desirable) to resolve it, and the extent to which it is a widely shared direction of curriculum policy shift, not just a state-based or even national one, is a subject that requires further attention and to which we will return.

Acknowledgements

This paper is drawn from a Discovery Project funded by the Australian Research Council entitled School knowledge, working knowledge and the knowing subject: A review of state curriculum policies 1975-2005 (see University of Melbourne, 2008). Brenda Holt and Katie Wright supported this work as project officers and assisted greatly with the organisation of our research. We want to especially thank the following people who contributed to interviews and advice and guidance relating to curriculum materials in South Australia but who bear no responsibility for the interpretations made in this paper: Jim Dellitt, Leonie Ebert, Judith Gill, Alison Mackinnon, Alan Reid, Julie Roberts.

References

Blackburn, J. (1982). Background comment on the Keeves Report: education and social change in South Australia. Unpublished conference paper, National Curriculum Conference, University of New England.

Collins, C. (1993). Competencies: for and against. In Australian Curriculum Studies Association, Curriculum in profile: Quality or inequality (pp. 29-38). Canberra: Australian Curriculum Studies Association.

Collins, C. (Ed). (1995). Curriculum stocktake: Evaluating school curriculum change. Canberra: Australian College of Education.

Collins, C., and Vickers, M. (1999). Post-compulsory schooling in comparative perspective. Australian Curriculum Studies Association Conference. Perth.

Cormack, P., and Green, B. (in press). Rereading the historical record: curriculum history and the (post) linguistic turn. In B. Baker (Ed.), New curriculum histories Rotterdam: Sense Publishing.

Crafter, G., Crook, P., and Reid, A. (2006). Success for all: SACE Review at a glance. Overview of the SACE Review. Report to the Minister of Education and Children's Services on the Review of the South Australian Certificate of Education (SACE). Adelaide: Government of South Australia.

Dellitt, J. (2007). Interview with C. Collins, 4 May 2007.

Ebert, L. (2007). Interview with C. Collins, 3 May 2007. Education Gazette: South Australia (1970-1990). Published under the authority of the Minister of Education. Adelaide: A. B. James, Government Printer.

Eyers, V. (1992). Report of the Junior Secondary review: The education of young adolescents in South Australian schools. Adelaide: Education Department of South Australia.

Gilding, K. (1986). Making things work: Learning for competence and enterprise. Report of the education and technology task force to the Minister for Technology. Adelaide: Government of South Australia, Ministry of Technology.

Gilding, K. (1988). Report of the enquiry into immediate post-compulsory education, vol. I. Adelaide: Education Department of South Australia.

Gilding, K. (1989). Second report of the enquiry into immediate post-compulsory education: Implementation of the proposals made in the Enquiry's first report in January 1988. Adelaide: Education Department of South Australia.

Gill, J. (2007). Interview with C. Collins, 30 April 2007.

Green, B. (2003). Curriculum inquiry in Australia: Towards a local genealogy of the curriculum field. In W. Pinar (Ed), Handbook of international curriculum research. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Harris, C., and Marsh, C. (2005). Curriculum developments in Australia: Promising initiatives, impasses and dead-ends. Canberra: Australian Curriculum Studies Association.

Jones, A. W. (1970). Freedom and authority in schools. Memorandum from the Director General of Education to Principals in Departmental Schools. Adelaide: Education Department of South Australia.

Jones, A. W. (1972). From the Director General: One year after Karmel. Education Gazette, 1 March 1972.

Karmel, P. (1971). Education in South Australia: Report of the committee of enquiry into education in South Australia 1969-1970. Adelaide: Government Printer.

Karmel, P. (1973). Schools in Australia: report of the interim committee for the Australian Schools Commission. Canberra: AGPS.

Keeves, J. P. (1982). Education and change in South Australia. Adelaide: Education Department of South Australia. Marsh, C. (1994). Producing a national curriculum: Plans and paranoia. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.

Marsh, C. (2005). Curriculum development in Australia: Promising initiatives, impasses and dead ends. Adelaide: Openbook.

Mayer, E. (1992). Putting general education to work: The key competencies report. Melbourne: Australian Education Council and Ministers of Vocational Education, Employment and Training.

Mercurio, A. (2003). Questions as answers: Understanding secondary education selection and certification practices in South Australia, 1950-2000. Adelaide: Senior Secondary Assessment Board of South Australia.

National Curriculum Board. (2008a). Our work. Retrieved May 19, 2009, from http://www.ncb.org.au/our_work/our_work.html

National Curriculum Board. (2008b). National curriculum development paper. Background reading for Into the future--National Curriculum Board forum, 27 June 2008.

Reid, A. (2007). Interview with C. Collins. 2 May 2007. South Australia. Education Department. (1981). Into the 1980s: Our schools and their purposes. Adelaide: Government Printer.

South Australia. Education Department. (1982). Diversity and cohesion: A policy statement on multiculturalism and education Adelaide: Author.

South Australia. Education Department. (1983). Equal opportunities for girls. Adelaide: Author.

South Australia. Education Department. (1984). Sexual harassment. Adelaide: Author.

South Australia. Education Department. (1985). Languages. Adelaide: Author.

South Australia. Education Department. (1986). The education of girls: An implementation of strategy. Adelaide: Author.

South Australia. Education Department. (1990a). Educating for the 21st century: A charter for public schooling in South Australia. Adelaide: Author.

South Australia. Education Department. (1990b). Anti-racism. Adelaide: Author.

South Australia. Education Department. (1990c). Multiculturalism in schooling and children's services. Adelaide: Author.

South Australia. Education Department. (1991). Students with disabilities. Adelaide: Author.

South Australia. Education Department. (1992). Aboriginal education operational plan. Adelaide: Author.

South Australia. Department of Education and Children's Services. (1995a). Curriculum statements and profiles implementation support plan 1995-1997. Adelaide: Author.

South Australia. Department of Education and Children's Services. (1995b). Assessment and reporting for schools. Adelaide: Author.

South Australia. Department of Education and Children's Services. (1995c). An assessment, recording and reporting resource. Adelaide: Author.

South Australia. Department of Education, Training and Employment. (2001). South Australian curriculum standards and accountability framework. Adelaide: DETE Publishing.

South Australia Department of Premier and Cabinet. (1989). South Australia's social justice strategy: Building a brighter future. Adelaide: Social Justice Unit.

Teacher Research Literacy Clearing House. (2008). Teacher research in South Australia. Retrieved August 2008 from http://www.literacy.unisa.edu.au/clearinghouse/

Thomson, P. (2002). Schooling the rustbelt kids: Making the difference in changing times. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.

University of Melbourne. (2008). Curriculum Policies Project. Retrieved May 19, 2009, from http://www.education.unimelb.edu.au/curriculumpoliciesproject/

Cherry Collins

Lyn Yates

University of Melbourne

Authors

Cherry Collins is a Principle Fellow in the Faculty of Education, University of Melbourne. Email: [e-mail]

Lyn Yates is Pro Vice-Chancellor (Research) at the University of Melbourne as well as Foundation Professor of Curriculum in the Faculty of Education. Email: [e-mail]