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The rapidly changing world places new demands on society and especially the education sector. Skills, attitudes, values, and knowledge about topics such as digital and data literacy, globalisation, literacy for sustainable development, and computational thinking are ever more relevant. Interest groups, parents, teachers, school leaders, and governments may put pressure on the curriculum to change in response to these novel demands. At the same time, curriculum lacks the space to easily add new content without causing overcrowding in the curriculum. Students need to learn deeper and not more; their learning time should not be extended nor should students learn at a surface level. Countries face a significant challenge of being responsive to changing needs while also minimising curriculum expansion and overload.
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Recent societal, technological and economic changes have placed pressure on school systems to adapt their curriculum by including various competencies (e.g. digital and data literacies, global competencies, financial literacy, media literacy, coding and programming, entrepreneurship, environmental literacy, health literacy, and social and emotional skills).
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Time is a finite resource for both students and teachers, and students and teachers often feel that a curriculum is crowded or overloaded. When addressing the issue of curriculum overload, curriculum designers frequently face questions such as: “Is it real or perceived?”; “How can we accommodate new demands from society in an already crowded curriculum?”; and “How can we ensure breadth and depth of learning that are both achievable within the time allocated in a curriculum?”.
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Countries/jurisdictions experience curriculum overload in a variety of ways depending on their national contexts and circumstances. This section focuses on comparing different country/jurisdiction approaches to accommodate emerging societal needs into the curriculum The section compares available OECD data and data collected through the OECD Future of Education and Skills 2030 Policy Questionnaire on Curriculum Redesign (PQC) and Curriculum Content Mapping (CCM) exercises on all four dimensions of curriculum overload. This international comparative data can be a starting point for policy makers to inform their efforts in curriculum design and redesign.. It first presents an overview of which cross-curricular themes and competencies are articulated in curricula as well as how countries/jurisdictions make different choices on embedding them in existing learning areas so as to avoid further expanding of the already overcrowded curricula. The section then delves into different country/jurisdiction approaches to structure subject-specific goals in curricula and their potential impact on the content overload as perceived by teachers.
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This section outlines the challenges faced by countries and jurisdictions attempting to address curriculum overload, and the strategies they have adopted to address them. They relate to curriculum overload in three areas examined in this chapter: content expansion, content overload, and curriculum pitch and workload.
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The strategies introduced in the challenges and strategies section (see “What types of challenges do countries/jurisdictions face in addressing curriculum overload, and what strategies do they use to address these challenges?”) could be options to address the challenges of managing curriculum overload. While the strategies may be helpful, they may also have unintended consequences. Some countries and jurisdictions have reported experiencing outcomes that were not anticipated when using these strategies. This added further complexity to minimising curriculum overload.
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