Insight

New South Wales is embarking on a curriculum change that is the first major change in over 30 years. Priorities for the change are to build strong foundations, provide more time for teaching and strengthen post school pathways.

Secondary School

be taken in a variety of ways and across a range of different situations. This includes both in-class activities and formal Assessment Tasks.

Toongabbie Christian College has embarked on the implementation of the new curriculum journey in Secondary School. The planning began back in 2022 when the new English and Mathematics curriculum documents were released, along with other new curriculum such as Stage 6 Software Engineering, Geography and Stage 4 and 5 Languages. In 2024, the new Secondary School curriculum that has been implemented includes English, Mathematics and Languages for Years 7 to 10 along with Years 11 and 12 Geography and Software Engineering. In 2025, the new curriculum will be introduced at the College in Year 11 Health and Movement Science that will replace Senior PDHPE. For the development of English and Mathematics, the College created space and time for our expert teachers to dedicate the time to write and design our new curriculum programs and related assessment strategies. This took over 12 months to write and develop in consultation with teachers across faculties. This was seen as an investment in the core literacy and numeracy programs in the Secondary School to ensure that the tasks in the classroom increases learning outcomes for our students. The Secondary School saw that the Assessment and Reporting processes required a greater focus on the grading process. Assessments will now include on-balanced professional judgements that assess student performance based on a Common Grade Scale. Teachers will need to make judgements using a range of tasks and provide for a student to demonstrate their achievement based on the syllabus outcomes. The opportunities for students need to

This year, Academic Reports have included graded outcomes and an overall grade, marks or ranks.

The A-E grades on the report not only indicate the level of achievement at that time but can lead to goal setting and discussions around what a student needs to do to improve. This can be done with the classroom teacher or by looking at a Grade Scale.

The impact

Year 10 students have a yearly examination to create three assessment tasks per year per subject. This is to allow teachers the time to fully understand their students and observe how they learn and develop a culture of learning in the classroom that meets the needs of each student. The curriculum change is seen as a positive move by the students at Toongabbie Christian College. With the number of outcomes in subjects being reduced and content updated, the potential exists to lead towards a more engaging learning experience for students.

Mr David Carter Dean of Curriculum Secondary

The curriculum changes mean that reading and writing are linked together so that students

build knowledge and demonstrate comprehension and

The curriculum change is seen as a positive move by the students at Toongabbie Christian College.

critical thinking through all their learning tasks in English.

Insight

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