The curriculum lies at the heart of every school. The knowledge and skills that students are taught in class every day can set them up for life.

We need great teaching in every classroom, but great teaching requires careful planning.

To make this happen, a coordinated, whole-school approach to curriculum planning and materials – which carefully sequences teaching of key knowledge and skills across subjects and year levels – is best.

This approach takes the lottery out of learning, because it guarantees that all students receive common, high-quality teaching that supports them to build knowledge and skills through their school years. Teachers benefit too – high-quality curriculum materials improve their classroom instruction and give them more time to tailor instruction to their students’ needs.

The benefits are clear. Yet, schools rarely work this way. Two recent surveys by Grattan Institute of more than 7,000 teachers and school leaders sounded the alarm. We discovered that few teachers have access to high-quality curriculum materials for all their classes. As a result, they often plan alone, scouring the internet for lesson materials. This can waste a lot of teacher time and means students are taught a highly varied curriculum. Many teachers are disatisfied with current approaches to curriculum planning and see the benefits of shifting to a whole-school approach.

Tackling this problem will require action from school leaders and teachers, as well as governments, and Catholic and independent school sector leaders. Grattan Institute’s 2022 report, Ending the lesson lottery: How to improve curriculum planning in schools, sets out what governments and sector leaders should do to help tackle this problem.