A Comparative Study of Strategies and Challenges Related to Overloaded Curriculum in Primary School in Australia and Ireland: Lessons for Iran

This research was conducted with the aim of comparative study of the strategies and challenges of the selected countries in facing the overloaded curriculum in the primary school. The comparative research method is of a qualitative type based on the Bereday approach and the selection of countries was based on the strategy of different social systems, different educational outcomes . The method of data collection was documentary searching the Ministry of Education websites, reliable databases and international reports. The findings indicated that similar strategies in both selected countries were in terms of expanding the content, adopting an integrated and interdisciplinary approach, and in terms of content overload, content rearrangement in the areas of learning, clarity and simplification of early childhood documents and programs. Australia’s strategy is to use key concepts and big ideas, reduce the scope of content, experimental implementation and interactive curriculum, and Ireland’s strategy is spiral approach and self-evaluation of schools. Similar challenges in the content expansion dimension, adding new topics to the demand of influential groups, and in the content overload dimension, content and documents are repetitive and voluminous, and different challenges are the lack of vertical communication and the difficulty in prioritizing content at the local level in Ireland. Finally, suggestions were presented for Iranian curriculum planners, the most important of which is to use an interdisciplinary approach to include new content in available subjects and to identify and remove unnecessary repetitions of content between subjects and grades.