By Clare Feeney
A serious structural issue exists within the Australian education system: A total lack of oversight around the quality of classroom resources. There is no central body responsible for vetting and validating the materials used in classrooms. Instead, teachers are expected to create, curate and deliver content, often from scratch and outside their paid working hours, without systemic support. It’s no wonder teachers are burnt out!
From my own experience as a teacher and through years of direct conversations with educators, it’s become clear that the invisible burden of crafting hundreds of lessons makes it increasingly difficult to keep great teachers in classrooms. A huge one in four plan to leave the profession, citing workload as the top reason. Many clock an extra 12 hours per week just to build lessons, all for an education system that still relies on inconsistent and invalidated resources.
Every week, I hear the same thing from teachers across the country. They want to focus on their students. They don’t want to build teaching and learning resources from scratch for their subject’s entire curriculum. Passionate, capable educators want high-quality, research-backed materials they can trust, so they have more time to focus on teaching. The idea of providing comprehensive but editable resources to teach with is met with relief, not resistance.
Yet somehow the myth persists, particularly in academic discourse, that centralisation reduces innovation and teachers must do all the work themselves in order to have autonomy. This mindset perceives curated, shared, quality-assured resources as a threat to professional freedom. The current situation, however, means students experience lessons of varying quality depending on their teacher. Furthermore, teachers are lumped with an unacknowledged workload equivalent to several weeks a year.
A randomised controlled study from the US Department of Education found that providing access to structured, research-backed curriculum materials improves student outcomes by up to 12 per cent. That’s a bigger impact than reducing class sizes. With evidence like this, it’s difficult to justify teachers building their own curricula in their own time, using resources of unknown accuracy or educational merit.
In the best case scenario, teachers are duplicating efforts and wasting time recreating lessons that already exist elsewhere. In the worst case, students are learning from inaccurate, outdated or even misleading information, which undermines their learning outcomes. Over time, this erodes trust in the education system and leaves students who are already vulnerable at a greater disadvantage.
Other sectors, such as healthcare and aviation, have robust frameworks for quality assurance and professional autonomy. Outside Australia, these are seen in education, too. In the United States (though their system has its own challenges), there have been moves toward greater curriculum coherence. For example, RAND’s Coherent Instructional Systems Toolkit, has been designed to help districts and schools assess and improve the alignment and coherence of their instructional systems.
Imagine an education system where every classroom is equipped with trusted, high-quality resources. This provides equity, while freeing teachers to focus on what they do best: inspiring learning. It doesn’t mean sacrificing the autonomy that teachers value. Adapting and responding to students’ needs can be done within a framework that guarantees quality and consistency of resources.
It’s time to acknowledge that quality education doesn’t depend solely on who’s teaching (I wish it did, we have amazing teachers in Australia!), but also on the resources they’re using to teach. A more unified, thoughtful approach to curriculum support would go a long way toward retaining great teachers and giving every student a fair chance.
Clare Feeney is the Head of Education at Stile Education.