The curriculum 'forever soup' problem

Why something being 'in the curriculum' often fails to translate into classroom practice because we lack visibility - let alone accountability - of what is actually taught.

The education reporting at the Sydney Morning Herald is typically a leader in its field, and this story from editor Chris Harris covers some fascinating education research that goes to the heart of what schools are (or should be) all about: what are students actually taught?

The research in question was conducted by Gregory Keith, part of a University of Sydney PhD.¹ As the SMH reports, Keith surveyed 75 teachers across several schools about their experience of teaching the Holocaust to high school students:

Despite the inclusion of the Holocaust in the NSW history curriculum, more than 10 per cent of surveyed teachers said they did not teach it in years 9 and 10. Just over 30 per cent spend less than two hours covering it.

The news story also yielded some insights about which schools and which teachers found racism and prejudice a meaningful barrier to delivering effective Holocaust education, but that’s not what I want to focus on in this post. Instead, it’s significantly that Keith’s research shows over 40% of the teachers surveyed do not meaningfully teach the Holocaust in years 9 and 10 History despite it being in the syllabus that they do so.

Here I should produce the comment Harris obtained from the NSW Department of Education and NSW Education Standards Authority, who essentially claim the research is not representative and therefore not useful:

A NSW Department of Education spokesman dismissed the research as not an accurate “representation of the views or experiences of NSW public school teachers”.

A NSW Education Standards Authority spokeswoman said: “A survey of 75 teachers, out of 180,000 teachers across NSW, does not provide a relative snapshot of the work the profession does in this space.”

I shall return to these government comments shortly, but in my view the quantitative figures are evidence of a phenomenon I called ‘curriculum soup’ in my last post on financial literacy.

Is 'financial literacy' something we should teach?

‘Curriculum soup’ is when external actors decide ‘something must be done’, the ‘something’ is adding a topic to the curriculum - perhaps with some specially constructed ‘resources’ gathering digital dust on a website somewhere - and job done.

But much less attention is paid to the curricular whole. Instead of the written curriculum functioning as a tapestry, with multiple threads woven to create a coherent image, it is just a soup of ingredients that float unappetisingly in a lukewarm broth.

A more apt metaphor might be perpetual stew or forever soup, which is consumed and replenished, but it never comes off the boil, and nothing is ever removed or discarded.

Via ChatGPT.

This is where recent attempts to address social necessities via ‘education’ fall down. If new additions are not properly integrated into an overall coherent whole, with an understanding of how parallels and dependencies might sit both within the relevant domain and across others, they feel like just another ‘thing’ some faceless bureaucrat has decided to add to the mix - not a valuable educational entitlement for students. Teachers facing finite instructional time will often prioritise content they regard as most important, most assessable, or most central to their conception of the subject. As I’ll argue further later on, it is eminently rational for them to do so.

Is Keith’s research representative? Does it matter?

I want to come back to the dismissive attitude captured by the NSW education bureaucracy to Keith’s research, but before I do it’s probably worth taking a closer look at Keith’s thesis, particularly who his research participants were - as this goes to the heart of the comments.

At various points in the thesis (see footnote 1 for the link), Keith tells us about his research participants. For the 75 online questionnaires, he acknowledges that the History Teachers’ Association NSW “facilitated the distribution of questionnaires”. The Sydney Jewish Museum emailed the questionnaire link to teachers on its mailing list. He also posted the link in the “History Teachers in New South Wales” Facebook group and Keith estimates the majority of respondents came via Facebook.

Keith is obviously trying to speak to a specific subset of teacher: one who teaches enough history (specifically at the year levels where the Holocaust is relevant) that they might lead an excursion to the Sydney Jewish Museum, participate in HTANSW events or share ideas in a Facebook group.

Keith mentions in the abstract that more than 20 of the questionnaire participants gave up yet more time to participate in the subsequent qualitative research. That is a very high participation rate in qualitative research, relative to the base number of online questionnaire participants. I think it speaks to the genuine passion History teachers have for their subject in general but also the complexity and importance of teaching the Holocaust specifically. These qualitative responses probably have more relevance to Keith’s specific research questions which relate to a demographic understanding of how and where the Holocaust is taught.

Less clear is how many schools or their location are covered by the collection. Keith names two schools (Nagle College in Blacktown and St John Paul College in Coffs Harbour) in his acknowledgements as schools he has taught in which presumably participated in the research. For ethics reasons Keith cannot publish the names of every school, but collected postcodes showing most teachers were across the Sydney metropolitan area with a small number from regional areas. Harris, in the news article, reports the number of schools as ‘dozens’ but I cannot verify this myself with the thesis. All three school sectors were covered via questionnaire participation but this is unlikely to be demographically representative.

So what should one make of the official NESA comments about how the research does not capture the work of all 180,000 teachers? Well, yes - all 180,000 teachers do not teach Stage 5 (Year 9 and 10) History, so that’s not the relevant base number anyway. Any research is limited in its scope, and no academic researcher can compel or even strongly encourage a teacher to participate. Participation will always be self-selecting. Keith himself recognises the limitation in recruiting a sample in this way, noting on page 58:

Those teachers who are not part of a professional network, who do not access teaching journals nor attend professional development courses, are possibly confronted by even greater classroom challenges and are possibly less equipped to deal with them. While this may be speculative, it is an important consideration for future research in this area: how should teachers be recruited so that genuine representativeness is achieved, while protecting confidentiality and the anonymity of teachers, schools and students?

If NESA is unconvinced by Keith’s findings that a large minority of teachers teach little to no Holocaust material, then perhaps they could run their own questionnaire - with the imprimatur of NESA - and challenge it directly. But they might not like what they find.

There is no curricular ‘Eye of Sauron’

In the Lord of the Rings universe, the villain Sauron is symbolised with a great ‘eye’ (a physical one in the films; more metaphorical in the books) representing his vigilance and desire to dominate the peoples of Middle-earth.²

If Keith’s finding that 10% of 9/10 History teachers do not teach the Holocaust and a further 30-odd percent spend less than two hours on it is even remotely true of the broader state of History education at Stage 5, this reveals exactly how little visibility there is on the part of education authorities of what is taught.

For all the complaints from teachers about too much accountability, no education authority in Australia possesses anything resembling the Eye of Sauron.

Any disconnection between syllabus policy and syllabus practice is problem for NESA which mandates the syllabus on the expectation that students are taught and assessed on everything that is in it. Other states take a much more flexible approach, and curriculum specificity does not look anything like NESA’s syllabus, partly because the Australian Curriculum has holes wide enough to drive trucks through.

As Keith notes about the Australian Curriculum’s Holocaust inclusion:

Yet the Holocaust sits as just one dot point, with three elaborations and no compulsory hours, in the national curriculum that has been adopted in some form by all states in Australia. Most of the states, where they mandate hours, provide 50 hours or less for a course that cannot possibly be taught in less than 80 hours. In some states it is less than 40 hours.

This gap between the written and enacted curriculum crops up again and again. It was a feature of my last post about financial literacy: there’s not much in the curriculum to start with, and since we don’t test students on what is there except in Maths, we don’t really know what they’re learning. Another element is that authorities don’t even know what is being taught, because teachers make that decisions instead.

This is why Larry Cuban has argued teachers are an example of a ‘street level bureaucrat’ and therefore are, in fact, policymakers (emphasis mine):³

…teachers take federal, state, and local policies sent to their classrooms (e.g., teachers have to take attendance, keep classroom order, use Chromebooks) and then adapt those policies to the contours of their classrooms. In doing so, they not only guard the gates of their classrooms but also become policymakers in what they accept, amend, and reject.

From district policies specifying that teachers use cooperative group work to policies urging teachers to integrate digital devices into their daily lessons, teachers, constrained as they are by the “grammar of schooling,” nonetheless, determine what and how they will teach. The fact is that teachers are gatekeepers who decide what gets into a lesson.

If the measure of policymaking is not just ‘a statement of what ought to be done’ but ‘a statement of what is done and the means to enforce it’ then teachers - arguably more so than educational bureaucrats - are the real policymakers when it comes to curriculum. In Victoria, that decision was devolved to the school and therefore teacher level quite consciously in the 1970s and has fundamentally remained that way since.⁴

Whether this is acceptable is a live matter for debate. It is a tension that comes up again and again, in matters of curriculum and pedagogy. But our current system is not only not designed to meaningfully wrest these powers away from schools and teachers, it cannot even hold them accountable for what is taught except in very limited ways.

The ‘limited ways’ are senior secondary, and NAPLAN. Education bureaucracies can collect and hold schools accountable in senior secondary pathways and results; schools can get audited on how well their coursework is compliant with the study design. With externally mandated exams, authorities can work out pretty quickly whether a school is compliant with the study design; parents also complain.⁵ Otherwise, there’s NAPLAN, which is part of school review frameworks like Victoria’s - I will talk about this because I am familiar with it and I can’t find any online information about what it might be like in NSW state schools.

In Victoria, other than having documented scopes and sequences for all subjects, the level of scrutiny of a school’s documentation - to say nothing of how well the documentation reflects what is actually being taught - really depends on the school reviewer themselves. The new Framework for Improving Student Outcomes weights ‘learning’ and ‘wellbeing’ equally, and if you have a school and a reviewer who decides to parse ‘learning’ to mean something other than ‘the actual curriculum’, then reviews in practice can offer little scrutiny and accountability for what is taught.

To bring this back to the core point about curriculum and accountability: whether it’s economics, history, or civics and citizenship, if those subjects aren’t being NAPLAN-ed, who cares how thoroughly a school’s enacted materials in one of those topics meets the expectations in the written curriculum?⁶ There is no mechanism for anyone in power to ever know.

One of the frustrations I have in talking to non-educators in the policy space is the assumption that if you just get ‘the curriculum’ right - make sure the forever soup has the correct ingredients added to it - then the ‘problem’ will be fixed. But this reveals a profound lack of knowledge about how schools and teachers operate in the real world. As Douglas Carnine and Pamela Snow have explained brilliantly, teaching is not an evidence-based profession in the way external observers might believe.

What Education Can Learn From Trusted Professions

Pamela Snow: The Dog Ate My Homework: Education’s Evidence-Excuses Echo Chamber

Zoom out from the level of the individual teacher, and you will find that schools also operate in a similar space, at least as far as outcomes go.⁷ We have no Ofsted-like inspectorate which conducts deep examination of schools with meaningful consequences for those that fail.⁸ As I have shown, even the review process likely fails to adequately account for what students are taught and what they learn in areas outside senior secondary and NAPLAN-related subjects - not just because the reviewers don’t want to look (and many don’t), but because the Framework itself significantly under-rates the importance of academic and curricular outcomes. To put a very specific point on it, when was the last time you ever heard of an Australian school being closed because it failed to teach students adequately?⁹

What is thought to be taught in the area of Holocaust education and what is actually taught, as Gregory Keith’s research suggests, reveals a disconnection between education authorities and the practice of teachers and schools.

But the curriculum represents only one part of how education authorities (acting on behalf of the demos, the public) sets expectations of what schools are for and what schools should do, but with no way of meaningfully ascertaining whether expectations have been met. There is yet more thread to pull on this question.

1. You can find Keith’s full PhD, titled Holocaust Education in Sydney and Regional New South Wales Classrooms, on the University of Sydney’s website.

2. For readers interested in Tolkien's use of the Eye as a symbol, see Edward Lense (1976) "Sauron is Watching You: The Role of the Great Eye in The Lord of the Rings," Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature: Vol. 4: No. 1, Article 1.

3. Larry Cuban, “Classroom Teachers Are Policymakers”, Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice, May 20 2026.

4. The VCAA in its revised F-10 Curriculum, Planning and Reporting guidelines stated “The 1970s saw a major shift away from a centralised, prescribed curriculum to a strong focus on school-based curriculum development” and elsewhere states the [present] “Victorian government’s view that schools should retain their primary responsibility for the development and provision of teaching and learning programs, not through a rules-based approach but by building on Victoria’s history of school-based curriculum development” but also notes this devolution “has not always been accompanied by a sufficient level of advice and support to schools to enable the development of system-wide high-quality teaching and learning programs.”

5. See this on the VCE Vis Comm subject in 2018; this on the QCE Ancient History subject in 2025.

6. We do have National Assessment Plan sample assessments of Year 6 and Year 10 students of ICT, Civics and Citizenship and Science, but I don’t think a school asked to participate has ever been expected to incorporate these into materials for review; I doubt anyone at VCAA, etc, has school-level visibility of how students fare in these assessments.

7. If crime statistics show worsening crime, you can bet your bottom dollar that both the Justice and Police minister(s) and the state’s Police Commissioner will be questioned over this. Not so much educational failure.

8. In England, the Gove/Gibb reforms meant schools rated ‘Inadequate’ could receive an ‘academy order’ - forced to become an academy. See here and here. This is not an endorsement of Ofsted or advocacy for Australian Ofsted, but merely to point out that it’s a pretty significant example of ‘consequence’ for ‘failure’ which Australia completely lacks.

9. Someone older and wiser than myself could write about the saga surrounding the Class of 1996 from Mount Druitt High School, in Sydney’s north-western suburbs. But even the experience of that school - splashed across the Daily Telegraph with the headline “The class we failed” - failed to force a real reckoning with the idea that it was even possible for a school to send an entire class of Year 12 students out into the world with a Tertiary Entrance Rank below 45 - and for virtually nothing to happen afterwards except a rebrand.

Note the headline used in the Daily Telegraph story: the class we failed. Not “the class who failed”. The failure was that of the adults, not the literal children. And yet that is all that incident is remembered for now: the tabloid was mean to the kids, and here is why singling out schools is bad. ABC Background Briefing did a story about it nine years later in 2005. These Sydney Morning Herald stories (here and here) in 2010 - 14 years after the original incident - use the Mount Druitt HS case to complain about the school-level visibility created by the MySchool website.