Australian Education Declaration Analysis

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The National Declaration on educational goals for young Australians was drafted in September 2008 by MCEETYA (the Ministerial Council for Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs). Superseding its predecessor, the ‘Adelaide Declaration on national goals for schooling in the twenty-first century’ (released 1999), the aims of the document are to address and establish “direction for Australian schooling over the next ten years” on a national platform (MCEETYA, n.d). As well as setting ‘equity and excellence’ in school education as the number one national goal, the Melbourne Declaration focuses on the needs of all young Australians in the twenty-first century. The second goal of the Melbourne Declaration is that ‘all young Australians…show more content…
However, the document does bring to the forefront a strong argument for the need to nationalise the Australian curriculum. In my opinion, I believe an additional educational goal would be for Australia to move toward a national and centralised education system. The challenge presented to the educational goals as they stand, is the framework by which the Australian education system is built upon. The decentralisation or state and territory-based curriculum that currently exists in Australia is a barrier to achieving the educational goals set out in the National Declaration. I believe the establishment of a national curriculum is crucial to achieving the educational goals set out by MCEETYA. There have been attempts to nationalise the Australian curriculum dating back to 1968 by the Commonwealth government (Reid, 2005). In my opinion, to achieve progress and to meet international standards, the education system needs to “collaborate in a globalising world” (Reid, 2005). “The focus should be on developing a common curriculum that will enable all students to develop a broad and general knowledge of the world” (Cole, 2007,…show more content…
As with the educational goals set out in the document, these initiatives provide a good basis for development of the education system as a whole in achieving the right outcomes. However, once looked at in greater length, there are elements in the ‘Commitments to Action’ that lack detail. Many of the actions are also very hard to implement and are at times idealistic and impractical. The current decentralised education framework (as opposed to a national curriculum) is also a barrier to the implementation of these actions. Considerations in relation to funding should be explored throughout the document. Realistically, equipping all schools and students with ICT technologies is a costly task. There is no mention to how such initiatives will be funded. This highlights the vague nature of the National Document. In addition, an increased hands-on approach to learning should be investigated; for example work experience and internship programs. This will better equip students with greater skills for the ‘real world’ and include the wider community in the education

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