Curriculum
Improving the quality of curriculum at each level of a system is perhaps the most important reform that system and school leaders and teachers can make.
Insight and actions
Upcoming event
Learning First Curriculum Conference:
Enriching learning through quality curriculum
19-20 August 2026
Sydney, Australia
Schools
We support systems around the world with improvement strategies, teacher and leadership development, training centres, school improvement and planning initiatives, and the design of evaluation and data systems for continuous improvement.
We regularly collect data from schools to inform how to reform the system curriculum and improve implementation policies and supports.
Systems
We work with schools on their improvement strategies, school planning, teacher and leader development, including roles and responsibilities, and implementation planning, and monitoring and accountability systems. Our work is based on how the leading schools in the world operate, and the research on organisational change and improvement. We work closely with leaders on their work, supporting change at each level of a school.
Curriculum Benchmarking: Understanding the rigour and quality of a Curriculum
Executive Director Mailie Ross on Curriculum reform
Detailed curriculum benchmarking is essential to develop a world-class curriculum. It is the detail of the content that matters as it is the detail that is taught and assessed in classrooms. It is this detail that sets the floor and ceiling of student learning.
Comparing curriculums is not new, but many reports lead to spurious findings as they are too high-level. High-level analysis has seen many curriculums categorised as similar when more rigorous benchmarking has shown that the content is quite different. This leads to missteps in curriculum design and writing.
We support systems to design and write high-quality curriculums by rigorously benchmarking content across subjects and year levels. Our approach enables systems to compare the depth and breadth of content to other systems, define clear proficiency expectations, and map coherent student progression. We identify content gaps, overlaps, and excessive jumps between year levels, strengthen the clarity of content descriptions so teachers know exactly what to teach and assess, and ensure the overall level of challenge drives deep, rigorous learning.
Benchmarking provides a clear evidence base to design and write a world-class curriculum. For example, it has shown how some curriculums can have more content but less progress for students as the depth and breadth of topics covered was misplaced, and the progression of learning was lacking.
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