Increase in opportunities for disaster resilience education in the new Australian Curriculum

The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) has released the Australian Curriculum 9.0.

During the 2021 public feedback phase for the curriculum, AIDR provided a detailed submission calling for an increase in disaster resilience education (DRE) opportunities. We are pleased to see that there has been a significant increase in areas of the curriculum applicable to disaster resilience education across Foundation to Year 10.

There has been an increase of approximately 200% in content descriptions and 130% in content elaborations relevant to DRE. Content descriptions describe what is to be taught and what students are expected to learn. Content descriptions include knowledge, understanding and skills, described at a year level or band of years. The content descriptions are accompanied by content elaborations, which are optional, and are provided to give teachers ideas about how they might teach the content.

In addition to an increase in content and skill descriptors and elaborations in the Humanities and Social Sciences and Health and Physical Education curriculums, there are exciting new areas of the Mathematics, Digital Technologies, and Design and Technologies covering bushfire, land management, fire danger ratings, and flood emergency messaging.

Full mapping of the Australian Curriculum 9.0 for disaster resilience education is available on the AIDR Education for Young People site here.

A full copy of AIDR’s submission during the public feedback phase of the curriculum development can be found here.