The persistence of the curriculum hierarchy in Australian senior secondary education

The curriculum hierarchy is a powerful heuristic for understanding the socially constructed value that senior secondary curriculum systems place on school subjects. Yet it is also a concept that holds a contested place in policy and academic debate concerned with educational inequalities and pathways. This paper demonstrates the critical importance of the concept of curriculum hierarchy for understanding the persistence of educational inequalities in senior secondary Australian education and the limitations of recent policy reforms seeking to address these inequalities, bringing theorising of the curriculum hierarchy in dialogue with analysis of senior secondary subject achievement patterns over time. Updating and extending earlier scholarship by Teese (2000/2013), the analysis confirms that the New South Wales senior secondary curriculum is organised by a hierarchy of subject status and value, access to which is socially and spatially structured, and that this hierarchy has been remarkably durable across time as it remains embedded within the form of the curriculum, despite attempts at policy reform. The paper calls for more detailed and sustained attention to the nature and structure of the curriculum hierarchy in senior secondary education, and the enduring social and cultural forces that produce and reproduce it.