The NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA) just released new draft senior Creative Arts syllabuses for Year 11 and Year 12 students, including the drama syllabus. The announcement comes as part of raft of changes following the NSW Curriculum Review, ambitiously titled Nurturing Wonder and Igniting Passion. 

Among the new draft syllabuses, the subject of senior drama received its first major revamp since 2009. This means that the current opportunity for enhancing drama curriculum is momentous.

This curriculum review represented a potential step towards elevating the status of drama in schools and society. Drama is, after all, is one of the most important subjects in preparing students for the world of work.  The draft review fails drama and drama students.

Your chance to evaluate

Teachers, academics and other stakeholders now have the chance to evaluate the proposed drama syllabus in a formal consultation period that ends on 20 December 2024.

However, the interim reaction among stakeholders is mostly negative. Educators are dissatisfied and disappointed. The refined content reduces rather than strengthens the learning opportunities necessary for delivering a quality drama (and creative arts) education. This issue starts at a policy level and extends well beyond the decision-making practices of any school leaders and teachers. 

A dramatic cut 

The elimination of the HSC Group Performance examination is the most significant notable change. What’s in its place? An internally assessed rather than externally examined ensemble piece. This shift devalues the Group Performance as a major work that requires students to collaborate to devise an original piece of theatre. 

For many teachers and students, this component of HSC drama is the preeminent experience because of the intellectual demand and corroboration of knowledge and skills in making, performing and appreciating drama. It is also a vital means to valuing actor-audience relationships and honouring communication and storytelling through the relay of meaning in real time.

The devaluing of this core component of the existing drama syllabus is a threat to the craft of drama. It produces an overreliance on prescribed content and leaves fewer legitimate opportunities to showcase the dramatic arts as intended through style or form, role and character, and structure and action. 

It also signals cost-cutting measures. Facilitating external examinations across the state of NSW is not inexpensive. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile. 

Elimination of choice

Additionally, the proposed drama syllabus eliminates choices for the Individual Project. This component of the drama course requires students to communicate a directorial vison for a key text through deep exploration and application of specialised knowledge and skills. Current project options are Director’s Folio, Portfolio of Theatre Criticism, Costume Design, Lighting Design, Promotion and Program Design, Set Design, Scriptwriting, Video Drama, and Performance. 

However, the draft syllabus cuts Director’s Folio, Lighting Design and Video Drama. These projects are three critically important parts for sustaining any theatrical tradition and the entertainment industry more broadly. 

A reduction of choice might seem small. But we cannot underestimate the value of enabling students to choose which content to pursue to nurture their creative abilities. Giving students choice in drama specifically provides a scope and flexibility that is rare among most subjects. It provides learning benefits such as skills in time-management, self-regulation, creative autonomy, and risk-taking. In a society that looks to encourage higher order thinking and creative skills, such a move is retrograde at best.

Missing the texture

The draft syllabus now states that “All Individual projects, excluding performance, will be submitted electronically to reflect industry practice and support best practice in marking processes” (see p. 9). Now, projects are packaged and posted, then sent through the mail for external examination. This process is necessary because the projects are tactile in nature; for example, costume design projects tend to use carefully chosen and delicate fabric swatches. 

Limiting the Individual Project to digital submissions impedes creative and aesthetic possibilities available to students and is a disservice to the art form. The justification that this change aligns with “industry practice” relies on using software programs that many schools simply cannot afford to purchase. And the point about “best practice in marking processes” is debatable. 

Eroding the arts by curriculum design

Unfortunately, arts subjects are usually first on the chopping block in schools (and universities). 

Recent research also reveals a worrying decline in the proportion of NSW public secondary students participating in creative arts courses in Years 10, 11 and 12. This includes dance, drama, music, visual arts, visual design, and photographic and digital media. 

But any view that arts subjects appear less popular or that students are abandoning arts subjects overlooks that they are ranked lowly in the status spectrum of school subjects. They are deliberately positioned as optional extras – ‘peripheral’ as opposed to so-called ‘core’ learning areas. This subject hierarchy means that students are rarely equipped to make informed choices about studying arts subjects (or not) due to a lack of quality learning experiences within arts subjects. 

Indeed, this curriculum context remains devastatingly unjust given a vast majority of Australian school students still have little or no access to quality arts education. It also neglects the inherent value and human need for the arts and goes against a growing body of research about the benefits of arts education. If we learnt one thing from the recent Pandemic, it was the need for all of us to engage and consume arts content in a time of isolation.

‘Revival’ of the arts in Australia?

Ironically, the federal Labor Government (2022) initiated changes on a policy front that position the arts as an important agenda. Specifically, the national policy, Revive, outlines five pillars designed to enhance the cultural ambitions of Australia over the next five years and beyond. They are:  

• First Nations First;  
• A Place for Every Story;  
• Centrality of the Artist;  
• Strong Cultural Infrastructure; and  
• Engaging the Audience.  

These pillars provide a timely policy framework for rethinking the role of the arts in society and education, particularly for nurturing the lives, livelihoods, and wellbeing of people across the country. 

A degree of scepticism

However, this policy warrants a degree of scepticism. The focus on ‘revival’ conveys a need to restore resources and strategies that are deficient given deliberate attempts to erode them. 

The gap between national policy aspirations and the proposed curriculum changes to creative arts subjects such as drama has severe potential consequences for what students have the opportunity to learn in school, and the future possibilities available to them outside of school, in terms of employment or otherwise. 

The hearings of 2024 NSW Inquiry into Arts Education continually demonstrated the ongoing diminishment, paucity and degradation of the Creative Arts in schools; despite the wealth of talent in both staff, pupils, and the wider community. As educators we can choose to either focus on basic skills creating industrial automatons, or recognise the Arts as a key skill to empower articulate, inventive, and engaged future citizens. When students study the Creative Arts they succeed across all aspects of their education, and beyond.

Matthew Harper is an early career researcher in the Teachers and Teaching Research Centre at the University of Newcastle. Matt has collaborated with colleagues on a range of research exploring student aspirations, quality teaching in schools and higher education contexts, and curriculum and pedagogy theory and development. His doctoral research compared secondary mathematics and drama in the Australian schooling context.

David Roy is a lecturer and researcher in Education and Creative Arts at the University of Newcastle (AUS); and was formerly a teacher for 17 years. He uses his research to inform inclusion and equity practices across Australia, with a particular focus on children with a disability, policy, and engagement with the Arts.