Framing teachers’ curriculum work in the Australian print media: the ‘lesson lottery’, workload, and the evolving role of public policy think tanks

Questions about teacher knowledge and expertise are longstanding internationally. This tension has intensified in Australia in recent years, with discussions of a ‘lesson lottery’ experienced by Australian students by virtue of teachers’ varied approaches to curriculum planning. In this article, we present an analysis of how teachers’ curriculum work has been framed in the Australian print media over the past five years, and who has framed the problem in this way. We use corpus-assisted methods to identify and critically analyse a set of 44 texts focused on teachers’ curriculum work from a corpus of over 10,000 media articles published in national and capital city newspapers between 2019 and 2023. Through this process we identify two frames–the ‘lesson lottery’, and curriculum as part of teacher workload–and examine the networks involved in constructing these frames, highlighting the role of think tanks as particularly salient. Overall our analysis identifies an emerging shift towards the outsourcing of teacher professional knowledge authorised by the current workload crisis. We argue that this shift is contributing to an ongoing ‘democratic deficit’ in Australian education in which trust in teacher professional judgement continues to be undermined.