Since NESA developed curriculum Fact Sheets last year, the IEU has met with most employers who have consistently assured us they are not expecting documentation that exceeds NESA compliance requirements.
Yet teachers are still reporting that documentation around programming is the number one contributor to work intensification.
When developing documentation, keep in mind that the primary audience for a program is you, the teacher, and where there is a common teaching program, your grade colleagues.
Your profession, your program
NESA compliance can be established easily with a line of sight from the syllabus, through the scope and sequence, to the teaching program and, finally, the evidence in student workbooks.
You are not required to join the dots through additional and unnecessary rationales, detail and annotations. And apart from what is stipulated in the Record of School Achievement (RoSA) process, you are not required to keep work samples.
It is reasonable to expect that anyone who wishes to confirm a specific program’s compliance status should have read the syllabus and should also possess the professional capacity to establish the line of sight through the school documentation to the student workbooks.
NESA syllabuses provide a rationale for teaching specific content. Replicating rationales in individual programs is redundant and defeats the initial point: that the primary audience for a program is you, the teacher.
NESA has made it very clear through its recent Curriculum – school registration requirements Fact Sheet that annotations are only necessary where the program has been changed, that brief annotations are perfectly acceptable and that the level of detail of those annotations is a matter for the teacher.
If you and your colleagues still experience unreasonable requests to include unnecessary rationales, duplication within programs of adjustments already documented elsewhere, lesson-by-lesson detail that would be expected of a pre-service teacher, or daily annotations and reflections that do not enhance teaching and learning or program development, you should ask: Who is requesting this detail? Once that has been established, the true purpose of the request will be clear.
There are no “degrees” of compliance. If a program is compliant, that is that. The concept of “best practice” documentation is often code for work intensification.
Our profession, our solutions
Where members have identified work intensification issues, the union advises your chapter to engage in professional discussions with school leadership teams, with the NESA Fact Sheet Curriculum – Programming and record keeping (scroll to page 3) and the IEU Fact Sheet poster as support material for making informed decisions.