Australian teachers have been provided with another vision for universal online curriculum resources designed to make classroom life easier and improve student outcomes.
After several hesitant starts to provide teachers with a reliable bank of shared lessons, the latest move might actually deliver on quality promises. It’s backed by the Australian Academy of Science, aiming to provide science and mathematics lessons to primary teachers across Australia.
It’s a promising step towards delivering a reliable workload solution for all teachers. The key is in the backing of the resources by Australia’s top scientists - a measure likely to remove the lucky-dip of quality assurance and relevance that often dogs shared classroom materials.
Education Minister Jason Clare has returned to the idea of centralised materials many times in the past two years - and on budget night in May, he trumpeted $34.6 million for a National Teacher Resource Hub.
The goal was irresistible - to make evidence-based curriculum and student wellbeing support and professional development materials available to all teachers and school leaders, with a significant chunk of change in the budget and with the vision of reducing teacher workloads.
Universal teaching resources: work still to do
But, the delivery wasn’t exactly in line with the promise. The materials were important - including resources for a Year 1 phonics check and number check. Yet, the offering presented to Australian teachers was a fair way from a complete resource hub with reliable, high-quality resources that are adaptable for every class and student.
The most significant online lesson resource currently available to Australian teachers is Ochre Education - a not-for-profit organisation established as a response to Covid-19.
Ochre was set up to offer free support to all Australian teachers and their students. The Ochre model is premised heavily on working with schooling systems - notably Catholic Education Canberra and Goulburn, and Melbourne Archdiocese Catholic Schools.
“Each of these partnerships enables us to draw on the experience of expert teachers within those systems to develop curriculum and instructional materials, and support implementation,” explains Caroline Reed, co-CEO of Ochre.
“In doing this, we are also continuing to build those expert teachers’ capacity to implement evidence-based instruction within their own schools.”
Ochre now has nearly 55,000 registered users across nearly 7,000 schools. The highest rate of usage by teachers occurs in WA, Tasmania and the ACT, with the highest proportions from Catholic schools (noting Ochre’s partnership work with Catholic systems).
As well as not-for-profit providers such as Ochre, other commercial platforms also make up a significant part of the market, such as Teach Starter (part of Tes).
A potential workload solution
It’s this vision of a national resource bank that stands, for many, as a hopeful workload solution for many teachers - a pool of reliable, adaptable resources aligned to the requirements of the Australian curriculum. It’s a worthy goal, but many teachers are yet to decide to go all in with the venture - despite some systems backing Ochre to provide entire learning sequences.
Ochre was inspired by the presentation of a full-scale online curriculum resource via England’s Oak Academy. Established during the darkest days of Covid, Oak was designed to provide a one-stop shop for English teachers to effectively manage the switch to remote learning.
Since then, Oak has become an independent public body at arm’s length from the Department for Education, aiming to provide lessons in most subjects from early years to senior secondary.
However, all has not been smooth sailing for Oak. A third-party inquiry has been announced to ensure the “efficacy” of Oak as a public body. The inquiry will assess the market impact of Oak and has been tasked with providing indicators for continuous improvement for the organisation. School leaders have also raised concerns about the usefulness of the organisation, and Geoff Barton, former general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders has said it was “hard to see exactly where Oak fits”.
It’s a relevant question for Australia teachers. Where do these resources fit? Who provides the impetus? How are standards established and maintained?
Meet the classroom chatbot
Another option to reduce teacher workload through external resources is being trialed by NSW Education - aiming to provide teacher support via a generative AI chatbot for classrooms.
The trial has been running in 16 public schools for Semester One. The chatbot will not answer questions directly like ChatGPT, but offers guidance for students to extend their learning by giving resources, clues and prompt questions.
Billed as a virtual tutor, the NSWEduChat app is designed to provide classroom teachers with controls and oversight about how the app is used. At the back end, the Department’s control of the app means responses are aligned with NSW and Australian curriculums and the department’s values and policies.
Filters and topic controls have been established so the app will only respond to students’ questions that relate to school activities and education-related topics.
John Cole is a Year 7 teacher in the Australian Capital Territory. He is currently writing a thesis on career paths for Australian teachers
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