New HSC English Prescriptions document finally published

By Bradden Spillane

Is the HSC English Prescriptions document for 2009-2112 in response to political pressure rather than educational need?

With curriculum now such a political issue, I had hoped to be able report that the process for writing the HSC English Prescriptions document for 2009-2112 had been fair, transparent and in the interests of students and the subject English and that the representative Advisory Group had enabled varied stakeholders' voices to be properly heard and considered. But, on the basis of the final document and what is contained in the Sun-Herald article "2009 An HSC Odyssey" (July 22), I cannot guarantee to Federation members whom I represented as Federation representative on the Advisory Group for the HSC English Prescriptions that either of those things happened.

The Sun-Herald article, published several days before the Board of Studies' HSC English Prescriptions document was published, claimed "the draft [reading] list is the result of years of consultation with key education groups...The number of texts on the list [the Advisory Group's recommendation] will be reduced from 167 to 126." (For the record, there are 122 texts are on the 2009-2112 list.) If the article is to be believed, about one in four of the texts on the Advisory Group's list were deleted after it made its recommendations. Is this true? After all the consultation, how did that happen? What was the basis for rejecting so many carefully considered and selected texts? Who leaked this information to the Sun-Herald anyway? If the recommended list had been deliberately constructed to address the perceived restrictions in some areas of the current arrangements, were these concerns considered during the deletions? Despite being on the Advisory Group and not missing a single minute of any meeting, I don't know the answers to these questions.

If the Sun-Herald article is true, about one quarter of the texts recommended by the Advisory Group were cut before the list was published, then the Board certainly leaves itself open to allegations of pandering to political interests rather than catering to the educational needs of students.

In the current educational environment, an environment where media commentators like Kevin Donnelly, Miranda Devine et al are constantly spouting their conservative mantras and attacking teachers; where politicians like Prime Minister John Howard can call an outcomes-based education program "gobbledegook" and teaching of English as "a relativist wasteland", and Federal Education Minister Julie Bishop claims school curriculums are "straight from Chairman Mao", there is considerable political pressure on what teachers teach.

Each Prescriptions document is supposed to last three years but the current one has been in place since 2004. There is a widespread belief among teachers that one of the reasons the current Prescriptions have been in place so long is that a previously revised draft, prepared a couple of years ago, was rejected by the Board because the widely leaked proposed Area of Study, "Power," was seen as too political, too left wing.

Judging from personal comments made to me, especially at Federation Council, and those posted on the English Teachers Association Discussion Board, teacher response to the new text list is that it is disappointing, dull and uninspiring.

A slightly broader text list would allow teachers to better tailor their text selection to the diverse needs and interests of students across the state.

Is there some drastic problem with having more texts on the list? It can't be the costs to schools. Schools still need to teach the same number of texts. With a broader text list, they would just a have a wider range from which to choose. In fact, as a head teacher of English at a non-selective public high school with a relatively large senior cohort, I know, that the more texts on the list, the more likely it is, if necessary, I can reduce the cost of purchasing new texts. A wider selection is more likely to allow text combinations satisfying the requirements of both the modules and textual forms, meeting the interests and needs of my students while at the same time minimising the new texts needing to be bought. Further, the way the current system works, if a text is changed, often other texts also need to be changed to achieve a combination that satisfies requirements, particularly if there are limited choices of textual forms within modules. Teachers therefore tend to stick to the same combination rather than change, even if they feel stale with a text or if it is not well received. It is professionally beneficial for teachers to refresh themselves from time to time by teaching new texts but this is discouraged when choices are tight. It is hard to encourage staff to try an unfamiliar text when they may have to change a number of their choices and there is an additional cost involved. This is true in the Advanced course in particular where the Comparative Study of Texts and Contexts puts a straitjacket on the choice combination.

Another argument some advance for reducing the text list is that it is too hard to examine and frame questions for multiple texts. I can't accept that argument either. If the number of texts is so crucial, why is the choice from five texts okay for Module B in Extension 1, but only four for the other modules? More importantly, in most assessment responses across all the courses, students are required to synthesise both the prescribed text and related texts of their own choosing into their arguments. Questions must be designed to allow them to do that. Isn't this what the rubric is about? Similarly, if markers can be expected to assess responses containing students' open-ended selections of related texts, how can there be a problem with an extra prescribed text in an elective? And while the modules remain the same, in the new document electives have been cut from each of the mainstream courses.

All this considered, it is hard not to believe the English Prescriptions document is a response to political pressure rather than educational need.

Bradden Spillane was Federation's representative on the Advisory Group which drew up the new HSC English Prescriptions document. As the Federation Representative on the Advisory Group for the HSC English Prescriptions and therefore having signed a confidentiality agreement, he has confined his observations to the published document and the media and teacher reception of it rather than the workings of the Advisory Group. He teaches at Brisbane Water Secondary College (Woy Woy campus).

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