There was a piece called “Teacher burnout fuelling national shortages” on the ABC’s Radio National this morning. The federal government reports that there will be a shortage of 4,000 teachers by the end of next year (honestly, I thought it was already higher than that), and that the main contributing factor is high workload resulting in burnout.
In the NSW Parliamentary Inquiry into Arts and Music Education and Training in New South Wales hearing on 23rd August, the Executive Director, Curriculum, NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA), Dr Paul Cahill, claimed (consistent with recommendations in the NSW Government Masters report in 2020 that the curriculum was too cluttered) “I would say that the current syllabuses, not the new syllabuses, are very crowded and they’re very busy”.
This statement exemplifies Dr Cahill’s lack of understanding of his own music syllabi. As I explained in more detail in my article on the new syllabus for the Australian Association for Research in Education, and in my podcast on the subject, the new syllabus includes 56 content points to be taught in 100 hours in years 7 and 8, and another 57 content points in years 9 and 10. That’s 113 more than before. Many of these content points are not actually musical knowledge, but verbal knowledge about music – a move back toward the NSW syllabi of the 1960s and 1970s documented in Dr Jennifer Carter’s recent PhD on the subject.
[I don’t have a great image for incompetent music syllabus development, so I’m sharing a photo I took of sunrise over Narrabeen lagoon yesterday, instead.]
There is a tension in Dr Cahill’s claim that he doesn’t tell teachers how to tell their students, and his accusations that teachers are “cherry picking” music content in the current syllabus and need to be told exactly what to teach in the new one, rather than teaching to broad musical outcomes, which is much less busy-work. Cahill claimed that “the syllabus is not a pedagogical document”, a quite extraordinary statement that I will deal with in another article.
But whichever way you consider those tensions, Dr Cahill clearly doesn’t understand music pedagogy, the history of music education, what the leading research and practice is in our field, and has definitely led the development of a new music syllabus that will add significantly to the workload of music teachers and the resulting burnout that is today being reported as the leading reason teachers are leaving the profession.
I had a lovely visitor at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music yesterday. Dr Emily Wilson, senior lecturer in music education at the University of Melbourne, was passing through. Emily is a curriculum expert and was talking about the way that, following leading research and practice of the last 30 years, they teach the that the Victorian curriculum should be taught with the music experiences of performing, composing, and listening integrated and centred over the verbal concepts of the “Elements of Music” (also syllabus content). This is a process that we’ve also been able to follow in NSW thanks to the fact that our 2003 syllabus was pretty cutting-edge. It even includes the statement
In designing teaching programs, teachers should provide a program that balances work in each of the learning experiences. Learning in music occurs best when these experiences are integrated with each other. (p.18)
In response to Emily’s thoughts, I showed her the unit of work planners that we use to teach preservice music teachers how to plan units of work at the Sydney Con – I shared them with you in an earlier blog post. Those planners do exactly the same thing – encourage teachers to think imaginatively about units with exciting and engaging music learning contexts, and make sure that they can engage in those contexts through integrated experiences in performing, listening, and composing. Only then do they flip over the planner and check off outcomes – which from 2026 will mean flipping over and checking off 56 or 57 content points.
Emily was horrified that NSW curriculum had taken such a step back, at the same time the Victorian curriculum had moved forward. I also pointed out that the integration language has been removed from the new syllabus, and the “learning experiences” term has been replaced with “focus areas”, which suggests quite the opposite (our suspicion is that this has happened because NESA decided to force all shaped pegs into a round hole called maths syllabus terminology: funnily enough, music learning is nothing like maths learning, and if you don’t believe me, I’ll send you a few hundred research papers and books to read). The integration language has just been added into the Victorian documentation.
The new syllabus should be withdrawn. A fresh syllabus should be written, with the NSW Government’s backing to make it world-leading. NESA need to end their secretive syllabus development practices, and become accountable to government, teachers, parents. Their work in music needs to become educative and evidence-based. Right now they are developing the new Stage 6 (year 11 and 12) syllabi. I have absolutely no faith they’ll do a good job.
