Australia: Significant Characteristics of the School System and the Mathematics Curriculum

Abstract

In Australia, states and territories regulate their own education systems, however, national benchmarks representing minimum standards for Numeracy (in the areas of number sense, measurement and data sense, and spatial sense) help inform the individual state curricula. Australia has three school sectors: Government, Independent, and Catholic. As data collection in the Learner's Perspective Study (LPS) was restricted to Government schools, this overview focuses primarily on the types of schools from which the Learner's Perspective Study (LPS) data from Year 8 mathematics lessons was collected: Victorian government secondary schools.