NSW curriculum

Our nationally-leading music courses are now under threat

The NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA) curriculum review puts music courses at risk, not just in NSW, but across Australia. NSW has twice the number of students taking music than any other state. That makes it a leader.

The proposed changes fall short of research, best practice, and teacher expectations. This is despite NESA’s claims of strengthening post-school pathways and fostering lifelong learning, . 

Worst of all, the “revamped” Music 1 course—the country’s most popular Year 12 offering — severs meaningful ties to further study or the music industry.

The back story

NSW has historically enjoyed the leading music curriculum in the country, when measured by innovations and research internationally.NSW modernised its senior music syllabuses in the 1980s and embraced integrated learning: students performed, composed improvised alongside traditional literacy and aural skills. This inclusive approach reflects real-world diversity and career pathways. It was strengthened in the 90s and in 2000 by a focus on multiculturalism, contemporary Australian music, and student specialisation.

“Music 1” is by far the most popular course. It’s a music-for-everyone course. You don’t need to have studied an instrument privately for years to take Music 1. You can be a Chopin-loving pianist, a shredding guitar soloist, or an Electronic Dance Music producer. You can study any music of the last 1,000 years. You can elect to specialise in performing, composing, or musicology. Or you can balance each of those learning experiences. 

Envy of the nation

This broad choice has made us the envy of the nation. Dr Emily Wilson, senior lecturer in Music Education at the University of Melbourne, usually speaks jealously when she talks about our courses, because she says that at around 7% of the total HSC candidature, it’s twice the rate of student engagement compared to Victoria and Queensland. 

“Music 2”, in its own words, “focuses on the study of Western art music”. Even this more traditional course was really cutting-edge for its time. It insisted all students learn to compose, even if their specialisation was in performance. And in the HSC year , it focuses on contemporary Australian Music rather than classical or romantic repertoire. Music Extension can only be taken by Music 2 students, with a Western art music focus. It has allowed these students to do a further specialisation in one area of their choice.

These courses were far from perfect. They feature outdated elements like requiring song submissions via written scores. Also, the obsolete “Concepts of Music” highlighted the need for more authentic approaches to music theory and literacy. Pedagogical breakthroughs in other countries would benefit NSW. These include  the extensive research and practice in informal learning, and culturally responsive pedagogy.

The problem at NESA

Concerns about NESA’s reform began early. Educators experienced disappointment with the new K-6 and 7-10 syllabuses. They regressed from evidence-based integrated approaches and added rigid content. The opaque process was marked by non-disclosure agreements and vague public feedback summaries. By NESA’s own admission, it left educators guessing how their input shaped the final drafts.

The NSW syllabuses since the 1990s had been based on Swanwick and Tillman’s 1986 Curriculum Spiral model . NSW used to pride itself on a continuum from year 7 to year 12, with skills  built on at each stage of learning. The proposed changes erase the continuity in the senior curriculum, performing, listening, and composing in years 7-10.

NESA relies on a workforce with varied professional backgrounds – rather than subject experts with deep teaching experience. That leads to poor decisions and leaves specialists grappling with flawed syllabuses. Meaningful consultation—such as face-to-face sessions across the state, not just online updates—would boost teacher morale. That’s particularly true in rural areas, where the process currently feels like a steamroller, pushing ahead despite clear deficiencies.

NESA’s shortcomings in understanding music education have been replicated in the recent release of an equally poorly researched and written drama course. All of the evidence (in the syllabuses themselves) suggests this is because of NESA’s intransigent position toward making the Arts subjects fit into the same template and nomenclature as the more “important” subjects such as maths, English, and science.

Attacks on Music 1 – Time Travelling, backwards

Music 1 has been the leading music course in the country because of its breadth of choice and inclusion. The draft syllabus destroys the diversity and inclusivity of the existing course, while at the same time making it weaker against its own evidence base.

Gone are the wide range of topics that can be studied, and in their place a restrictive list of mandatory “Focus Areas”. While many have incorrectly thought of Music 1 as “the pop course”, it actually served as a conduit for many classically-trained musicians in public schools that could not afford to run both courses. Sadly, that is most of them. Under the new mandatory list, this is impossible. Now songwriters, DJs, producers, and other contemporary musicians will be forced to study topics of little interest to them or relevance to their future careers. It is an aggressive narrowing of the curriculum which experts believe will lead to widespread disengagement from the course. Prescribed topics were part of the early music syllabuses for the 1950s Leaving Certificate, carried over to the first HSC music syllabuses, then relinquished in the 1980s in line with leading research and practice.

The proposed examination includes the introduction of a two-hour aural exam with increased weighting. The composition and musicology electives are being binned, reminiscent of the 1970s.

Attacks on Music 2 and Extension

The proposed Music 2 examination allocates 40 marks each to written and performance exams, with restrictive performance options and limited topic choices. That curbs students’ ability to pursue their interests. The composition component, worth 20 marks, mandates a duet, trio, or accompanied solo within a narrow focus on recent Australian art music. While these changes may aim for equity, they undermine the syllabus’s flexibility and breadth. Similarly, the Extension examination now limits specialisations, requiring either two performance pieces (including an ensemble) or two compositions, alongside another 50-mark written aural exam focused on unspecified ‘prescribed’ repertoire—an approach reminiscent of rigid external testing. NESA’s pushing of written exams is a return to post-Sputnik debates about legitimising music in the curriculum in the 1950s

We assume – we hope –  NESA does not realise that it is repeating the mistakes of 70 years ago.

What does the research base really tell us?

The current curriculum reform, meant to be based on the Geoff Masters review Nurturing Wonder and Igniting Passion, diverges significantly from its recommendations. The report called for simplifying an overcrowded curriculum but the new music syllabuses introduce more content points and prescriptive structures. It advocated integrating knowledge and skills, yet the new syllabuses prioritise what Elliott & Silverman term “verbal knowledge”—written knowledge about music—over musical knowledge, assessed through music-making. 

Instead of flexibility, the new syllabuses impose mandated content, reducing teachers’ ability to adapt to their students. As Fuller notes, what works best may not work best for music education. Carter critiques NESA’s focus on the HSC, which pressures teachers to prioritize exam preparation over broader learning. Hughes highlights NSW’s fixation on maintaining standards and traditional benchmarks, with assessment driving curriculum changes. Teachers, however, recognise the importance of holistic approaches, and research confirms that successful teaching builds on students’ understanding of the subject.

A restrictive, exam-focused syllabus will inevitably result in restrictive, exam-focused teaching.

We need transparent curriculum reform led by experts

NSW is the biggest education system nationally and has led the way with senior secondary music enrolments for many years. This is due to its focus on active music making and promoting choice for students. That in turn places value on the musical interests of students, their autonomy, agency and inclusion. 

We asked our Melbourne colleague Emily Wilson what she made of the new draft syllabuses and she said “Following a recent major review of the Victorian Certification of Education Music Study Design, we now have ‘Music Inquiry’, a project-based music subject explicitly positioned as music-for-everyone, moving Victoria closer to the existing NSW HSC Music 1 course.

Every student a stakeholder

“We have been looking to NSW for almost 35 years to lead the way with a progressive curricula. It’s important that this continues so that senior secondary music curricula keeps pace with the ever increasing rate of change in the music industry and broader society. Every Australian student and music teacher is a stakeholder in the NSW HSC Music Syllabus.”

James Humberstone is a senior lecturer in music education at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, The University of Sydney. He specialises in teaching music pedagogies, technology in music education, and musical creativities. James publishes traditional research focusing on music teacher worldview, technology and media in music education, and artistic practice as research. He is also a composer and producer whose music is performed in major venues around the world.


After a career as a music teacher and head teacher in NSW schools, and Chief Examiner of HSC Music in NSW, Jennifer Carter worked as a Senior Registration Officer at the NSW Education Standards Authority. She was a sessional lecturer for primary music and secondary music preservice teachers and has presented at music conferences both nationally and internationally. Her PhD thesis researched secondary classroom music teachers and the development of music syllabus documents.

The dark side of NAPLAN: it’s not just a benign ‘snapshot’

The release of the latest NAPLAN results this week identified a problem with student performance in writing. This prompted the federal minister for education, Simon Birmingham, to state these results “are of real concern”. And the CEO of Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, Robert Randall, added that “we’ll have a conversation with states and territories” to pinpoint the exact problem.

You get the message: there is a problem. As I see it we have a much bigger problem than the one the minister and ACARA are talking about.

At the moment, we have two concurrent and competing ‘systems’ of education operating in Australia, and particularly in NSW: one is the implementation of the state-authorised curriculum and the other, the regime of mass tests which includes NAPLAN and the Higher School Certificate.

The bigger problem

 NAPLAN results get everyone’s attention, not just mainstream media and parents, but also teachers and school communities. Attention is effectively diverted from curriculum implementation. That means that resources, teacher attention and class time is soaked up with attempts to improve the results of under-performing students. It means that the scope and depth of the curriculum is often ignored in favour of drills and activities aimed at improving student test performance.

In a way, this is sadly ironic for NSW, given that new syllabuses rolled out across 2014-2015 have the development of literacy and numeracy skills as two of seven general capabilities. Specific content in these syllabuses has been developed to strengthen and extend student skills in these two areas. 

Before teachers had the chance to fully implement the new syllabuses and assess student learning, the NSW government jumped in and imposed a ‘pre-qualification’ for the HSC: that students would need to achieve a Band 8 in the Year 9 NAPLAN reading, writing and numeracy test. Yet another requirement in the heavily monitored NSW education system.

And if the federal education minister has his way, we’ll see compulsory national testing of phonics for Year 1 students, in addition to the NAPLAN tests administered in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9; and then in NSW, students will have to deal with the monolithic HSC.

So the ongoing and worsening problem for schools will be finding the space for teaching and learning based on the NSW curriculum.

Similar things are happening in other states and territories.

The dark side of national testing

As we know, mass testing has a dark side. Far from being the reasonable, benign ‘snapshot’ of a child’s skills at a point in time, we know that the publication of these tests increase their significance so that they become high-stakes tests, where parental choice of schools, the job security of principals and teachers and school funding are affected.

And here I will add a horror story of how this can be taken to extremes. In Florida in 2003, the Governor, Jeb Bush, called the rating of schools based with a letter A-F, based on test results, a “key innovation”. Using this crude indicator, schools in this US state were subsequently ‘labelled’ in a simplistic approach to numerous complex contextual features such as attendance rates, student work samples, the volume and types of courses offered and extracurricular activities.

Already in Australia NAPLAN results have a tight grip on perceptions of teacher and school effectiveness. And quite understandably, schools are concentrating their efforts in writing on the ‘text types’ prescribed in the NAPLAN tests: imaginative writing – including narrative writing, informative writing and persuasive writing.

So what might be going wrong with writing?

As I see it, the pressure of NAPLAN tests is limiting our approaches to writing by rendering types of writing as prescriptive, squeezing the spontaneity and freshness out of students’ responses. I agree it is important for students to learn about the structural and language features of texts and to understand how language works. However it appears that schools are now drilling students with exercises and activities around structural and language features of text types they’ll encounter in the test.

Has the test, in effect, replaced the curriculum?

Again taking NSW as an example, writing has always been central, dating back over a century to the reforms in both the primary and secondary curriculum in 1905 and 1911 respectively. The then Director of Education, Peter Board, ensured that literature and writing were inextricably linked so that the “moral, spiritual and intellectual value of reading literature” for the individual student was purposeful, active and meaningful. In addition to this, value and attention was assigned to the importance of personal responses to literature.

This kind of thinking was evident in the 1971 NSW junior secondary school English syllabus, led by Graham Little, which emphasised students using language in different contexts for different purposes and audiences. In the current English K-10 Syllabus, the emphasis is on students planning, composing, editing and publishing texts in print or digital forms. These syllabus documents value students engaging with and composing a wide range of texts for imaginative, interpretive and analytical purposes. And not just to pass an externally-imposed test.

In a recent research project with schools in south-west Sydney, participating teachers, like so many talented teachers around Australia, improved student writing skills and strengthened student enjoyment of writing by attending to pedagogical practices, classroom writing routines and strategies through providing students choice in writing topics and forms of writing; implementing a measured and gradated approach to writing; using questioning techniques to engage students in higher order thinking and portraying the teacher as co-writer.

These teachers reviewed the pressures and impact of mass testing on their teaching of writing, and like so many around Australia, looked for ways to develop the broad range of skills, knowledge and understandings necessary for all students, as well as ways to satisfy the accountability demands like NAPLAN.

Without the yoke of constant mass testing I believe teachers would be able to get on with implementing the curriculum and we’d see an improvement not only in writing, but also across the board.

Don Carter is senior lecturer in English Education at the University of Technology Sydney. He has a Bachelor of Arts, a Diploma of Education, Master of Education (Curriculum), Master of Education (Honours) and a PhD in curriculum from the University of Sydney (2013). Don is a former Inspector, English at the Board of Studies, Teaching & Educational Standards and was responsible for a range of projects including the English K-10 Syllabus. He has worked as a head teacher English in both government and non-government schools and was also an ESL consultant for the NSW Department of Education. Don is the secondary schools representative in the Romantic Studies Association of Australasia and has published extensively on a range of issues in English education, including The English Teacher’s Handbook A-Z (Manuel & Carter) and Innovation, Imagination & Creativity: Re-Visioning English in Education (Manuel, Brock, Carter & Sawyer).