Schools used to be places where kids learned to read, write, add up, and think critically. Under Labor — both state and federal — the curriculum has become something rather different: a vehicle for social engineering wrapped in education department language and delivered to children too young to push back.
This isn't about teachers. Most teachers are hardworking professionals who genuinely care about their students. This is about what they've been asked to teach, and who decided it.
The Curriculum Creep
Over the past decade, the Victorian and national curricula have seen steady expansion of content related to gender identity, sexuality, social-emotional learning, and progressive political themes — often at the expense of traditional academic content. Reading and numeracy results have declined. Screen time in classrooms has increased. NAPLAN scores have flatlined or fallen in many areas.
Meanwhile, the curriculum has added units on identity, wellbeing frameworks, and content that would have been considered wildly inappropriate for primary school students twenty years ago. Parents who ask questions are told the curriculum is evidence-based. The evidence, it turns out, comes from advocacy organisations with a view.
The Safe Schools Aftermath
Safe Schools was ostensibly an anti-bullying program. Critics argued — with some justification — that significant portions of its content went well beyond anti-bullying and into age-inappropriate material about gender and sexuality. After significant public backlash, the federal government defunded it. Victoria kept it, renamed elements of it, and embedded the philosophy deeper into the curriculum.
Parents who raised concerns were characterised as bigots. Some were. Most were not — they were mums and dads who wanted to know what their children were being taught and by whom. That's not extremism. That's parenting.
Who Decides What's in the Curriculum?
The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) oversees the national curriculum. State bodies adapt it. The people who sit on these bodies are appointed — not elected. They are overwhelmingly drawn from academia, education bureaucracies, and advocacy sectors. They are not representative of mainstream Australian opinion on how children should be educated.
Federal and state Labor governments have had years to reform these bodies. Instead, they've expanded their remit and their budgets.
The Results Are In
Australia's PISA rankings — the international measure of student performance in reading, maths and science — have declined steadily over two decades. We rank behind countries that spend less per student and focus more on core academic outcomes. The response from education departments has been to add more wellbeing programs and less structured literacy instruction.
More social-emotional learning. Less phonics. Fewer times tables. Better feelings. Worse outcomes.
Parents Are Noticing
Enrolments in independent and Catholic schools have grown consistently as parents vote with their feet. The parents who can't afford to leave the system are stuck. Their kids get what the department decides they should have, taught through a lens that has shifted considerably to the left of where most Australians sit.
If you think someone needs to say something about the direction of Australian education, our Re-Education Minister Tee makes the point with the subtlety it deserves. Sometimes the most political act is just asking the question.