Brad Fuller, Tom Fienberg and I wrote this initial analysis of the new NSW Music 1 syllabus when it was released just before the Christmas break. It was published on the blog of the Australian Assocation for Research in Education, EduMatters. As teachers return to thinking about school, teaching, and all those things, I thought this was the right time to republish it. Interested in what you think.
Breaking news: the new NSW music syllabi: better than we feared, but dogged by political ideology
A year ago, the New South Wales Education Standards Authority (NESA) released draft syllabi for its four Stage 6 (year 11 and 12) music courses. Along with the drama drafts, these were widely criticised here on this blog and in the broader media (for example, on the ABC and The Project). 37 of Australia’s leading music academics wrote an open letter to minister for education and deputy premier Prue Car, demanding that the draft be scrapped at the government begin again, with a more consultative process.
Car refused, deferring the letter to the Standards Agency itself, who did not change their closed syllabus development process in which writers and advisors sign non-disclosure agreements before participating, and meaning that the final version that was delivered this week would not have a second “have your say” period. In other words, what we have now is what teachers and students are stuck with for the foreseeable future, whether it’s good or not.
[Sidebar – if you’d like to provide feedback on the new Music 1 syllabus, the most contentious of the four, you can do so here: https://bit.ly/MusicHYS]
- At the time of writing, it’s important to be open about the fact that no one can be completely sure how a syllabus will work in practice until they’ve seen sample units of work and assessment documents (e.g. an example exam paper), because that’s where the “rubber meets the road” in terms of what and how teachers teach to give their students the best chance of success. NESA has not yet provided all of that information.
In the syllabi themselves, we detect an awkward tension between what expert music curriculum writers and advisors have asked for, and top-down requirements from NESA to standardise, in addition to the Standards Authority’s brittle and one-dimensional understanding of knowledge in music learning. We noticed this same tension at play several years ago in our analysis of the development of the Stages 4 and 5 (Year 7-10) Music syllabus, which resulted in a syllabus with some improvements over its 20 year old predecessor, but one that nonetheless was full of problems (over 100 “content points” for teachers to labour through, a move away from best-practice learning integration, and a lack of alignment with Stage 6 and tertiary/industry).
This is exactly what we see here again in 2025. Our early analysis of the documents suggests that for Music 2 and the Life Skills subjects, teachers will be able to continue “business as usual” without too much interruption. There might be a bit more “content” to churn out, but we need to see the sample documents and experience its implementation to know. Music Extension has a whole extra exam. And, sadly, our analysis of the Music 1 syllabus suggests NESA still failed to understand why it was the most popular school-leaving music course in the country, and that while it has some improvements, some of the changes are deeply retrograde . So, how did we get here?
Masters Review
Nurturing wonder and igniting passion: Designs for a new school curriculum was the review commissioned by the NSW government that “concluded that reform is urgent”, led by Professor Geoff Masters for NESA. It identified three key concerns that it recommended should be addressed in the development of new syllabi. First, that the curriculum was too crowded. Second, and perhaps key to musical learning, that “the frequent separation of knowledge and skills, theory and application, and academic and vocational learning in the current curriculum, and the associated undervaluing of skills, do little to support students’ understandings of how knowledge can be put to use or their development of skills in applying knowledge”. The third recommendation was that the prescription not only of content but timed progression through that content held some students back, while it meant others had to move on before they had finished or consolidated learning. We argue that, in Music, NESA’s implementation of these recommendations has been entirely opposite to Masters’ aims.
The Masters Review recommended a slow approach to reform, to make sure that it was done carefully and correctly, writing “Detailed planning, piloting and implementation of the new curriculum will be required over an extended period of time, possibly a decade, although some proposed changes should be introduced as a matter of priority”. In response, the NSW Government, at the time under minister for education and early childhood learning Sarah Mitchell MLC, made a commitment to creating a new curriculum for all years of school education within four years.
Cracks continued to show
The cracks continued to show. While the review pointed to a “strong divide” in the later years of schooling “between academic and vocational learning. These two kinds of preparation are based on different intended outcomes, curricular approaches, pedagogies, and forms of assessment.”, and that these differences “promote artificial and unhelpful distinctions between knowledge and skills, theory and practice, and academic and vocational learning”, the Government’s response was to “Provide opportunities for students to develop and demonstrate skills in applying knowledge”.
Since the 1980s, research in music education has aligned nicely with Masters’ original recommendations. Following the research, many curricula internationally have divided music learning into different modes, such as performing, composing, improvising, listening, analysing, and so on, but asked teachers to integrate those experiences. In best practice, as an example, this might involve a class learning to sing or play a piece of music, to work out how that piece of music was made (what instruments does it use? What chords or mode? What rhythms?), and then to create their own piece of music as an applied way of showing understanding.
These kinds of approaches can involve formal or informal theory and contextual learning (historical musicology, cultural context, and so on), and be assessed similarly. In fact, there are records of music being taught like this since at least the Elizabethan period, and it seems broadly adaptable across diverse musical cultures.
Sadly, in the rushed timeline adopted, NESA’s one dimensional approach to unified syllabus development, instead of avoiding “the frequent separation of knowledge and skills, theory and application, and academic and vocational learning”, has doubled down on the old Cartesian split. We saw this in the 7-10 Music syllabus, and it is painfully ever-present in the changes made to the Music 1 syllabus, in direct contradiction of Masters’ work and decades of research evidence.
So, what are those changes?
Australia’s best music-for-all course?
The way the Music 1 course is currently set up, teachers and students can choose from a list of topics (based on periods, genres, and other categories of musics), which means that the course can easily be adapted to any group of students with any specific musical expertise. In the new syllabus, the course is now organised into six compulsory “focus areas”, to give it the same kind of structure as syllabuses like maths and physics. Never mind that in the recent 7-10 syllabus, the “Focus areas” were composing, performing, and listening – musical experiences.
This is also the first clue that the previously “integrated” syllabus is now artificially disintegrating. Nonetheless, the focus areas are deliberately open (one could even say vague), which is excellent for both teachers and students, who should still be able to shoehorn the music they want to learn into the structure. And that’s the first example of the tension – NESA’s brittle implementation of a particular idea (focus areas, which are followed by content) which has obviously been carefully mediated by curriculum writers and advisors who do understand music and musical learning. The work for teachers is to move from the music for all approach of “choose a topic”, to “fit your work into these”.
Even if students can (mostly) study the music they want to, they can’t study as much of it as they used to. In the existing course, all students must perform one piece (this hasn’t changed), and can then elect to perform up to three more. Many students choose this path but the electives can also include compositions and/or musicology viva voces for students keen to explore those experiences too. In the new course, there is only one elective, halving the number of performance opportunities in the final external exams.
Similarly, compositions drop from a potential portfolio of three to a maximum of two, and musicology from three viva voces to one. The original breadth of choice was excellent for students preparing an audition or a portfolio for entry into tertiary study: NESA chose not to work with music education academics in making their HSC courses, so this is the kind of thing they were bound to miss.
Is it equitable?
We fear that the new course is inequitable, especially for young people in low-ICSEA schools.
One of the things that has generally been greeted positively by both teachers and academics is the introduction of a mandatory composition element – all students creating original music as part of the HSC, as they do in Music 2. We have also applauded the ability to submit this creation as an audio file. In the current syllabus, it must be submitted as a written score, which is both marginalising for students who haven’t had a classical western music education, but also entirely inauthentic for many styles of composition that aren’t traditionally notated.
The new syllabus reverses this problem. Students who have been trained on Western art music instruments, or in other traditions that use western notation, such as jazz, cannot submit an authentic composition completed as a score. They must have the score performed and recorded, both expensive processes, especially if the school does not already have recording facilities and access to professional performers. It seems more likely that students enrolled in expensive private schools will have access to the resources required to make a high fidelity recording. With better consultation, or a public “have your say” period, NESA might have realised that allowing students to submit whatever musical format was most authentic for their creation would be the most inclusive way to bring core composition into the Music 1 course.
The second major area of inequality arises through consideration of both internal and external assessment in Year 12. The core composition and performance that we’ve mentioned are each worth 20% of the external assessment mark, and the elective (which can be a second performance, composition, or musicological viva voce) another 20%. The remaining 40% is for a written exam. In their Engagement Report to the strongly negative feedback that they received to the draft syllabus – 95% of respondents (n = 579) disagreed or strongly disagreed with the statement “The assessment and examination requirements for 11-12 courses provide sufficient opportunities for students to demonstrate their knowledge, understanding and skills” – NESA stated they had reviewed “the weighting of, and duration of the written component of the examination” with “weightings revised, and duration reinstated to current arrangements”.
Nonetheless, the new syllabus and its assessment double down on the written component (double the requirements in the new Victorian syllabus), and school-based assessment bifurcates “prac and theory” (the opposite of the integration that the research base suggests) into 50% “Knowledge and understanding of course content, and 50% “Skills in performance, composition and musicology”. In addition, the “content” pages include an awful lot of ideas that are very culturally specific, and less open than the existing syllabus.
With this increased focus on verbal (not musical) knowledge, students who do not have strong literacy backgrounds, or who do not attend schools with extensive literacy support, are disadvantaged. For the last 20 years, Music 1 has been a wonderful outlet for students whose talent lay not with the written word, but in playing, singing, creating, or talking about music. These new weightings and assessment instructions, clearly against the Masters’ report’s original recommendations, disadvantage them.
Is it all bad?
This critique may make it sound like we think the whole syllabus is terrible. But it isn’t – it certainly isn’t as bad as the draft that was released just over a year ago. For example, we welcome deeper recognition of contemporary music-making, the legitimising of audio recording, and the permission for every student to be a creator and to tell their story.
The problem is that even in the more positive parts of the syllabus (we haven’t mentioned the excellent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander protocols), where the expert writers and advisors got their own way, there is an obvious tug-of-war with a top-down and secret process at NESA that prioritises a very functional view of musical knowledge and the process of learning that is based in an ideological and ill-educated response to the Masters report, rather than any understanding of music as an embodied art form and its learning as enactive.
Having such a heavy focus on learning about music rather than simply learning music is exactly the kind of split Masters was trying to avoid in the original recommendations. We commend the writers and advisors for resisting this as much as they did, but we are also sorry for the coming generations of music students in NSW who will have fewer opportunities to perform, write music, speak about music, as well as fewer practical connections to tertiary study and the music industry. And that’s exactly what we predicted would happen when we wrote to the deputy premier a year ago.
James Humberstone and Brad Fuller lead a group researching Educative Evidence-Based Practices (EEBP) in Music Education at the University of Sydney, together with Caitlin Sandiford and Emily Wilson (University of Melbourne).
James Humberstone is an associate professor at the University of Sydney, Brad Fuller is an associate lecturer at the University of Sydney and Thomas Fienberg is a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney.
This article was originally published on EduResearch Matters. Read the original article.
