I think that might be the first made-up click-baity title I’ve written since I called my 2016 TEDxOxford talk “The Science of Dubstep”. The latter was actually an advocacy piece for progressive music education, and I like to think quite a good one, but of course it got hated on by the Dubstep crowd, and fair enough.
This title is equally spurious because, as ever, the NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA) who write the syllabi do so in a cloak-and-dagger manner, with a secret writing team, a secret advisory team, with the public left to guess at how they arrive at the final documents (i.e. what discussions are had and what decisions are made) by comparing them.
Both groups have to sign non-disclosure agreements, though the latter group are named after the final syllabus is published. I spoke to some of those people after the 7-10 Syllabus, and they were all somewhere between disgusted and very disappointed about how it turned out. Way to go, NESA.
So, we know that the new syllabi are coming because the Standards Authority have told us that, but I don’t know what is in those documents, because they’d protected by draconian legal agreements. So how am I claiming they’re not great?
They’re not great
It’s easy to know that the new documents will not be great, because of the poor direction that the Standards Authority took the 7-10 Syllabus, released earlier this year, and to be taught from 2026. The new syllabus wasn’t terrible, it was just a long way off being world-leading, which is the ambition I personally have for NSW (and more broadly, Australian) curriculum. In other words, not-great; not-as-great-as-it-could-be. So, if your set-up is still essentially a syllabus written in the 1980s and tinkered with since (Carter, 2023), you can’t really write a world-leading follow-up course for your school-leaving cohort.
NESA and NESA’s leadership don’t understand music education at all
At the moment, there’s a state government Inquiry into Music and Arts Education and Training. I was privileged enough to give evidence at the last hearing, and was blown away by the level of understanding of the issues, and deep knowledge with which the Joint Select Committee asked questions.
I levelled some of the above accusations about poor curriculum development in my evidence, and it was interesting when the committee asked Dr Paul Cahill, the Standards Authority’s Executive Director, Curriculum Reform, to respond to them. Here’s the offending sentence, and you can watch it in his own words in video from Parliament House, if you like:
“The syllabus is not a pedagogical document.”
While the idea that the Standards Authority don’t tell teachers how to teach the syllabus content is a noble one (especially considering the deprofessionalisation of teachers over the last 20 years in NSW (Buchanan, 2020)), it’s simply not true that the new Syllabus isn’t a pedagogical document. I’m working on a research paper to show this in some detail, but here are the key facts:
- The strongest pedagogcial influence on the NSW syllabi is the Comprehensive Musicianship movement of the 1960s and 1970s (MENC, 1965; Jeaneret et al., 2003), which established
- Approaches for students to integrate learning about music (history, theory, aural skills, etc.) with traditional perfoming skills, as well as improvisation and composition
- “Elements” or “Concepts” of music as a written framework of categories for thinking about music.
- The influence of this pedagogy is first seen in NSW syllabi in the 1980s, and hasn’t changed much since (including in the new syllabus)
- While the new syllabus is supposedly the first rewrite since 2003, it retains the same pedagogical approach to thinking about music, with some minor changes to the nomenclature
- In the new syllabus, the explicit integration of learning experiences (Performing, Composing and Listening) of comprehensive musicianship is also retained, but the nomenclature is also adjusted, describing these experiences instead as “Focus Areas” and changing “integration” to “interrelated”.
- Since there is no music education research that suggests these nomenclature changes have any benefit, it is assumed that these changes are merely enforced to ensure alignment with the most “important” academic subjects, such as Maths and English.
- The NSW syllabus, as well as the Australian Curriculum, also show influence of pedagogies developed in the 1960s and 1970s in the “Creative Music Movement” (e.g. Painter & Aston, 1970; Schafer, 1967; Southcott & Burke, 2006) in the centring of Australian contemporary repertoire and students taking an active hand in composing and improvising – these influences remain in the new syllabus
- The 1990s pedagogical approaches to current thinking about multiculturalism in Australia, and how it ought to affect music education, which inflenced Cultural Diversity pedagogies that developed into the new millennium (Campbell et al., 2000)
As you can see, the new syllabus is packed-full of pedagogies that influence everything that happens. Sadly, on top of that, the new syllabus packed 113 content points to-be-taught, many of which are what Elliott and Silverman (2015) call “verbal knowledge”, that is written or spoken knowledge about music rather than musical knowledge (knowledge and musical skills such as playing an instrument, singing, improvising, composing).
If anything, I would suggest that layering on more pedagogical approaches (for instance, we have nearly two decades of research on informal learning that could really transform our syllabi to something world-leading), and critically appraising those from over 50 years ago that still dominate so much of what is in there, would be better than this pretence (or ignorance) that the syllabus isn’t a pedagogical document.
Mind you, I do think the idea of a pedagogy-free music syllabus is an interesting one. I’ll get to that in the academic paper – stay tuned.
We’ll probably see more of this kind of “content” rubbish in the new music syllabi for the HSC: I think it’s because the current crop of ideologues at the Standards Authority, and probably in the Department of Education at CESE, think that music education is all about delivering content to students. In fact, in the same hearings, they make an excellent defense of it as a claim for equity – every child whether in Bourke St (the centre of Sydney) or Bourke (outback Australia) has the right to the same “content”. Again, noble idea, but delivered in such a problematic, simplistic, and diochotmisitic way that won’t serve our children, especially in music education where kids need time to learn and practice music in a practical manner.
Even if the new syllabi don’t end up full of content-points-to-be-taught, we can’t escape the 1960s thinking on the Concepts/Elements of music that is truly out of date now (Rose & Countryman, 2013), because it is baked into the K-6 and 7-10 Syllabus. Given a generation passed since the last crop of syllabi, it’s absolutely extraordinary that this kind of old-fashioned thinking wasn’t questioned in the development of the new syllabi: and now our school-leaving students will waste another two years learning to think about music in ways that are totally inauthentic. Neither the music professions/industry nor tertiary music institutions have ever used this school-aged approach – it’s literally just busy-work that we added to music education to lend it more legitimacy in schools, with absolutely no Evidence-Base. Yet our Standards Authority think it’s a good idea.
So, I don’t know what’s coming the new syllabi, but I do know that it won’t be great. And I still think that children and young people in Australia, and specifically in NSW, deserve a world-leading music curriculum.
References that couldn’t be hyperlinked
Jeanneret, N., McPherson, J., Dunbar-Hall, P., & Forrest, D. (2003). Beyond Manhattanville, Paynter and cultural identity: The evolution of the NSW music curriculum. In Curriculum innovations in music–Asia Pacific symposium of music education research (APSMER) (pp. 137-141).
