Position Paper

It is the position of this paper that creation of a flexible curriculum will help in sustaining
communities with individual achievement and "economic performance" (Foreman & Arthur-
Kelly, 2014, p. 50) because when students are provided with equal opportunities, they tend to
perform to the best of their abilities, supporting social justice, social equity and inclusive
education thereby creating a cohesive and inclusive society.

Tailoring all round curriculum for all children with or without disabilities, will not only
engage students, but it will also create a sense of belonging and self-worth, thereby inspiring
all students to perform to their optimal potential. Such an adaptable and flexible curriculum
will encourage teachers to self-reflect, differentiate their teaching, and use personalised
learning plans to support all students with diverse needs including students with disabilities.
When a flexible educational approach will be made universal by planning and designing
curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, and environment with an accessibility to the diverse
learners then participation, engagement and inclusion will be facilitated in actual (Darragh
2007; Katz 2013; Tomlinson 2017; Valle & Connor 2011, as cited in Graham, 2020).

The main issue is that the principle of flexibility was aligned only with policy frameworks
with the standardised approach "one size fits all" with no "strategic vision" for special
education generally (Aspland, Datta, & Talukdar, 2012, p. 43). As a result, no reasonable
adjustments are made within the curriculum to cater for diverse needs of students with or
without disability, and it is indirectly misaligned with Disability Discrimination Act 1992 as
many students with or without disability experience exclusion pertaining to inflexibility and
inaccessibility of the Australian Curriculum (Foreman & Arthur-Kelly, 2014).
The Disability Standards for Education 2005 though obligates schools to provide reasonable
adjustments in pedagogies, curriculum, and assessment, as well as having special support
services to promote differential treatment but it is proved to cause a detrimental impact. The
reason being teachers are not able to explicitly judge the actual requirements of students
(Slee, 2018). This proves to be a deficit of the legislation phrase of reasonable adjustments
with no actions taken by the school for the meaningful participation of students (Poed, 2016).

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The Australian Capital Territory (ACT) focuses on the school-based curriculum framework
providing a core of discipline-based study with ten principles which are underpinned for
exercising curriculum decisions in schools. From those principles, one of the principles
focuses on equitability and inclusivity of the curriculum, yet there are no specific policies
related to students with special needs (Aspland, Datta, & Talukdar, 2012, p. 37). It clearly
indicates that there is lack of strategic vision in ACT schools, with least possibility of
legislation of alternative curriculums procedures (Aspland, Datta, & Talukdar, 2012).

Another issue is that according to NSW policy, curriculum is constructed in a more

problematised way because the term inclusion is applied superficially with a focus only "on
selected categories of students" setting baseline expectations for them (Hardy & Woodcock,
2015, p. 156). Consequently, instead of adjusting or differentiating their pedagogies to cater
for the needs of students learning difficulties, teachers seem to provide them with
undifferentiated and low-quality instruction. They prevent student with disabilities from
having high quality experiences by assigning them easy and unchallenging tasks which
involve insufficient cognitive and problem-solving skills (McLeskey & Waldron 2011). Thus,
Australian curriculum tends to promote social fragmentation and individualism as outlined in
the NSW policy and is unable to help students in maximizing their potential (Hardy &
Woodcock, 2015, p.161; Damianidou & Phtiaka, 2018).

Concurring on the idea of social fragmentation and individualism, many studies draw
attention to curricular inflexibility in terms of monitoring and assessing the progress of
students with disability. Students with or without disability are only tested against
standardised assessments such as NAPLAN. Such tests set students with disabilities up to fail
as inconsistent adjustments are made with some provisions for major exams, not for class
tests. Hence, such students cannot perform well on these “high-stakes tests” despite having
the potential to do so. For this reason, they are sometimes excluded from participating in such
exams which leave them to experience frustration and fragmented learning unlike students
without disabilities (Cumming & Dickson, 2013; Urbis, 2015). Not only this even in the HSC
exams some students do not get reasonable adjustments by NESA due to their disability
(Barnes, 2017 pp. 49). Sometimes parents and carers find the process of applying for
adjustments to NESA website not clear as it demands for too many evidences of disability
due to which parents refrain their child from year 12 exams or NAPLAN (Barnes, 2017).

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This depicts the deficit discourse of legislative policies made by NESA and its complex
procedures causing barrier in accessing these assessments by students.

Besides this, many studies consider the lack of support including funds, resources, teaching
aids and training for pre-service and in-service teachers as one of the underpinning issues
having a negative impact on the accessibility and adaptability of the curriculum.
In this context, it has been reported in the review of standards of education that students with
disability are disadvantaged not only due to “complexities of the support fund regimes’’ and
reluctance of schools to “deploy core funding” for student-support, but also due to
availability of limited academic texts and textbooks in “Create Once and Publish Everywhere
formats that allow adaptations to various accessible forms” (Urbis, 2015, p. ix).
Not only this the NSW Resource Allocation Model (RAM), provides resources based on
NAPLAN which is not a holistic measure to show the level of adjustments or support
required for equal access and participation of students, and thus students in some schools get
deprived of the required support (Graham, 2020). These extrinsic factors are posing a
negative effect on students learning and raise a need to adapt extrinsic elements to be
inclusive to all students (Cologon, 2014).

Recommendations
It is the need of the hour to modify the rigidness of curriculum by adopting some strategies at
the school level to make the classrooms inclusive and accessible for all. Initially,
Collaborative curriculum planning can be adopted by teachers where they can collaboratively
plan for the curriculum, making adjustment at their own personal level when teaching or
liaising closely regarding the content for individuals to provide support to students (Tiernan,
Casserly & Maguire, 2020). This planning can act as a foreground for students’ expected
learning outcomes as teachers can share ideas and knowledge about the pedagogy, curriculum
and assessment and can opt for some suitable modifications as per students’ requirement
(Harris, 2018).

The Collaborative Planning can also assist teachers in adopting a holistic approach of
Universal Design Learning (UDL) so that teaching and learning becomes productive for all
stakeholders. This will reduce the need of retrofitted adjustments and learning experiences

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can be designed proactively (Hinder & Ashburner, 2017). The UDL is flexible and strength-
based approach which integrates high expectations with genuine learning opportunities for all
students (Edynburg 2010, Katz, 2015 as cited in Cologon & Lassig, 2020). UDL can not only
provides flexibility and accessibility to curriculum but also a chance to make differentiation
in pedagogies to cater the specific range of students in classroom. So, together UDL and
differentiation can be accounted as Quality Differentiation Teaching Program, an approach to
teach diverse learners and bring inclusivity in the classroom (Graham, 2020). While planning
teachers can use mapping tools, weekly plans to agree on collaboratively, a platform for joint
planning and removing barriers existing within the assessments or activities, and later
adjustments can be designed and implemented to ensure full participation of students with or
without disability (Jitendra et.al. 2002 as cited by Tancredi, Dixon, English & Gallagher,
2020)

For maintaining differentiation teachers need to select appropriate pedagogical framework

with a repertoire of practices for responding to students learning and needs which again
demands professional knowledge of curriculum, collaboration regarding problems of practice
with other stakeholders (Tomilinson, 2017). As per Tomilinson 2017, universal approaches
are idealistic and can be accompanied with some scaffolds to provide opportunity to engage
in meaningful work, and further tiering can be done for differentiating by readiness of
students so that all students can work on same understandings but by engaging in different
tasks at different levels of challenge. Similar way when planning for assessments under UDL
it is important to provide multiple options for presenting their learning, with the focus on
making it explicit to students (Cologon & Lassig, 2020).
These recommendations together can bring substantial change in the environment just by
slightly amending them as per the environment of the school to make the classrooms
inclusive and free from any explicit barriers.

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