Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority

She went on to lead Lothar Hall Anglican Grammar School in Melbourne for seven years, and then spent a decade as chief executive of the Association of Independent Schools of South Australia.

Along the way, she has served on the boards of ACARA, Independent Schools Australia, and the Education Standards Board of South Australia.

She is currently presiding member of the Teacher Registration Board of South Australia, a trustee of the History Trust of South Australia, and chairs Sunedan Specialist School.

She is a Fellow of the Australian Council of Educational Leadership, an Honorary Life Member of AHISA, and was awarded an Order of Australia Medal for Services to Education in 2025.

A good example, so at my workshops, we do a Kahoot quiz of 10 questions.

So how do you define the skill of design in the Australian curriculum? And there are four multiple choice answers of the definitions that all come from the ACARA glossaries because ACARA defines everything.

And when we do that, we get four different answers all the time.

The assumption is I'm always 100% accurate with the curriculum.

Look at them.

Identify what is the cognitive verbs or the skills in those achievement standards.

What is the key terminology? Then collaboratively use the ACARA glossaries and define those terms, all of them, and then talk about them.

What does that mean so we're all on the same page? Then look at the achievement standards and talk about what is it students need to demonstrate in this achievement standard to demonstrate it? What don't they need to do? because it's very easy to add those things that aren't there.

It will soon be compulsory for students in years 9 and 10 to learn about civics and citizenship education rather than it being an elective course.

Federal, state and territory education ministers have agreed to task the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority to implement a course for the classroom.

Under the proposed plan, students would learn about the Australian Constitution, how laws are made, as well as how Parliament and the legal system operate.

It's been revealed Helen Haynes' accused attacker had allegedly run over a dog in the same vehicle, which had struck the politician.

We've been tracking this now for just over 20 years and the results are the lowest they've ever been.

I kind of figure that the most basic part of living in a democracy is understanding how it works and that's why We also made the decision on Monday to ask the curriculum body ACARA to do some work for us on making civics, the teaching of civics mandatory for year nine and year 10 so that young people leave school with a better understanding of the curriculum, the legal system, the way parliament works, the way democracy works, the way Australia works.

Minister, thank you for joining me this morning.

Thanks very much.

The state's education minister, Prue Carr, wants education ministers to go further.

New South Wales is still arguing for years seven and nine to be added to that and we've asked for ACARA, the curriculum body, to come back with some advice to education ministers on that because there's a growing body of evidence about the importance of writing with pen and paper.

Results from NAPLAN, the National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy, show writing skills scores have actually been about the same over the past few years, but still a third of students are not meeting expectations across numeracy and literacy.

Online testing for NAPLAN was introduced in 2018.

many of us in education can become sort of angry advocates for the space that we're working in, right? Because no one else sees this thing that's as important as us.

And when ACARA did make this decision, I think it was perceived as putting career education sort of on the periphery.

It was something on the sidelines, it was an optional connection and it wasn't valued.

And it's something I think that has been advocated for for a long time.