WA gives support to national curriculum

Western Australia has given qualified support to a federal government plan for a national school curriculum.
WA Education Minister Mark McGowan said he supported a nationally consistent school curriculum that allowed for regional variations rather than a single uniform curriculum for the whole country.
Education Minister Julie Bishop has released a report showing little consistency between states and territories on critical education issues. The minister is devising a plan to standardise the core subjects - English, maths, physics, chemistry and Australian history - at Australian schools. Mr McGowan said a nationally consistent curriculum would standardise assessments and reporting methods to help students moving interstate.
"We do believe that if children are coming from other states to here or children are going from here to other states that their schooling should be able to line up as best it can," Mr McGowan said.
But he said there should be state variations in topics such as history and geography to account for regional differences.
"A child studying environment and geography who lives on the edge of the Great Sandy Desert, is not particularly going to relate to the Great Dividing Range and the Barrier Reef," he said.
Mr McGowan agreed with Victorian Education Minister John Lenders that Ms Bishop was state bashing ahead of this year's federal election.
"Julie Bishop rolls out with it all the time, knocking the state education system, knocking public schools, saying we're beholden to unions is blatantly untrue."