The ‘Collective Years’ reflecting a culmination of the subjects into Personal Development, Health, and Physical Education (PDHPE) and Health and Physical Education (HPE) (1990–2024)
摘要
The individual histories of Physical Education (PE), School Sport (SS), and Health Education (HE) demonstrated that the subjects had a consolidated place in the New South Wales (NSW) education system from 1880 to 1989 based on the common political and socio-cultural needs served by their respective curriculum. The ‘untold’ combined history of the three subjects during the same period reflected the gradual realisation that the subjects could work together to achieve their individual curriculum outcomes and improve their subject status based on the synergic content addressed across the three disciplines. National educational reforms were responsive to the social climate of the late 1980s characterised by the effects of economic uncertainties, the alleged erosion of academic performance in schools, the increase in national rates of obesity and related diseases, and the escalation of public health care costs. From a national perspective, it was envisaged that the way Australia could recover from its economic stagnation and recession in the early 1980s was to shift the political control of education away from separate state-based curricula towards a national curriculum for all subjects from 1990s. The national curriculum representation of PE, SS, and HE was the ‘Health and Physical Education’ (HPE) subject, which formalised and culminated the apparent and historical synergies of the individual subjects into one encompassing curriculum. Notably, the NSW Education Reform Act (NSW ERA, 1990) dictated curriculum developments in NSW and established key learning areas (KLAs) that differed slightly to national curriculum movements. Therefore, the KLA of Personal Development, Health, and Physical Education (PDHPE), as opposed to HPE, reflected the culmination of the three subjects into one in the state of NSW. This chapter traces the ‘collective’ history of the establishment of HPE at a national level and the PDHPE curriculum in NSW from 1990 to 2024.