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Curriculum priorities and the stages of schooling

Links to the stages of schooling

The early years: levels 1-3

The purpose of the early years of schooling is to establish a firm foundation of knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values necessary for further learning. There should be a particular emphasis on students achieving high standards in literacy and numeracy, thereby establishing skills essential for success in all areas of learning. In many schools, integrated approaches to curriculum organisation and delivery reinforce the specific teaching of foundation literacy and numeracy skills as well as introducing key concepts in other key learning areas.

Stating the primacy of literacy and numeracy and the standards to be achieved involves the clear expectation that schools will actively pursue intervention strategies for students who are identified as not reaching the standards. This is the stage at which intervention is most likely to be effective.

Primary schools typically plan their programs on the basis that:

• students begin primary school with established knowledge and approaches to learning that vary widely from child to child
• students progress at uneven rates
• literacy and numeracy development are of paramount importance in the early years.

Language and mathematics skills, concepts and processes are developed across the curriculum. At the same time there needs to be discrete teaching of specific knowledge and skills in English and Mathematics to provide students with the basic tools to develop understanding in all key learning areas.

The CSF is intended to be used by primary schools to ensure that their approaches to integrated or holistic learning provide comprehensive coverage across all key learning areas. While the integrity of each key learning area needs to be maintained, it is unlikely that each one will be delivered separately in the P-4 classroom. Key learning areas can often be grouped for the purposes of curriculum organisation and programming. As teachers map their own programs against the CSF, they recognise relationships between the key learning areas. Curriculum delivery does not need to be fragmented in order to achieve the learning outcomes described in the CSF.