The English curriculum is built around the three interrelated strands of language, literature, and literacy. Teaching and learning programs should balance and integrate all three strands. Together, the strands focus on developing students’ knowledge, understanding and skills in listening, reading, viewing, speaking, writing, and creating. Learning in English builds on concepts, skills and processes developed in earlier years, and teachers will revisit and strengthen these as needed.

In Year 10, students interact with peers, teachers, individuals, groups, and community members in a range of face-to-face and online/virtual environments. They experience learning in familiar and unfamiliar contexts, including local community, vocational and global contexts.

Students engage with a variety of texts for enjoyment. They interpret, create, evaluate, discuss and perform a wide range of literary texts in which the primary purpose is aesthetic, as well as texts designed to inform and persuade. These include various types of media texts, including newspapers, film and digital texts, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, dramatic performances and multimodal texts, with themes and issues involving levels of abstraction, higher order reasoning and intertextual references. Students develop critical understanding of the contemporary media and the differences between media texts.

The range of literary texts comprises Australian literature, including the oral narrative traditions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, as well as the contemporary literature of these two cultural groups, and classic and contemporary world literature.

Literary texts that support and extend students as independent readers are drawn from a range of genres and involve complex, challenging, and unpredictable plot sequences and hybrid structures that may serve multiple purposes. These texts explore themes of human experience and cultural significance, interpersonal relationships, and ethical and global dilemmas within real-world and fictional settings and represent a variety of perspectives. Informative texts represent a synthesis of technical and abstract information (from credible/verifiable sources) about a wide range of specialised topics. Text structures are more complex and include chapters, headings and subheadings, tables of contents, indexes, and glossaries. Language features include successive complex sentences with embedded clauses, a high proportion of unfamiliar and technical vocabulary, figurative and rhetorical language, and dense information supported by various types of graphics and images.

Students create a range of imaginative, informative and persuasive types of texts including narratives, procedures, performances, reports, discussions, literary analyses, transformations of texts and reviews.

The content provides students with the opportunity to begin to focus on issues that affect the wider community. They study external influences on health decisions and evaluate their impact on personal identity and the health of the broader community. Students continue to develop and refine communication techniques to enhance interactions with others, and apply analytical skills to scrutinise health messages in a range of contexts.

In continuing to improve performance, students transfer learned specialised movement skills with increasing proficiency and success across a variety of contexts. They use feedback to improve their own and others’ performance with greater consistency, and critically evaluate movement responses based on the outcome of previous performances. Through the application of biomechanical principles to analyse movement, students broaden their understanding of optimal techniques necessary for enhanced athletic performance.

Students self-assess their own and others’ leadership styles and apply problem-solving approaches to motivate participation and contribute to effective team relationships. They are also provided with opportunities to assume direct control of physical activities in coaching, coordinating or officiating roles.

The Health and Physical Education curriculum provides opportunities for students to develop, enhance and exhibit attitudes and values that promote a healthy lifestyle.

Humanities and Social Sciences consists of Civics and Citizenship, Economics and Business, Geography and History. Students develop increasing independence in critical thinking and skill application, which includes questioning, researching, analysing, evaluating, communicating, and reflecting. They apply these skills to investigate events, developments, issues, and phenomena, both historical and contemporary.

Students continue to build on their understanding of the concepts of democracy, democratic values, justice, and rights and responsibilities by exploring Australia’s roles and responsibilities at a global level and its international legal obligations. They inquire in to the values and practices that enable a resilient democracy to be sustained.

Students are introduced to the concept of economic performance and living standards while continuing to further their understanding of the concepts of making choices, interdependence, specialisation, and allocation and markets through examining contemporary issues, events and/or case studies delving into the reasons for variations in the performance of economies. They explore the nature of externalities and investigate the role of governments in managing economic performance to improve living standards. They inquire into the ways businesses can manage their workforces to improve productivity.

The concepts of place, space, environment, interconnection, sustainability and change continue to be developed as a way of thinking, through an applied focus on the management of environmental resources and the geography of human wellbeing at the full range of scales, from local to global and in a range of locations.

Students develop their historical understanding through key concepts, including evidence, continuity and change, cause and effect, perspectives, empathy, significance and contestability. These concepts are investigated within the historical context of the modern world and Australia from 1918 to the present, with an emphasis on Australia in its global context.

The proficiency strands understanding, fluency, problem-solving and reasoning are an integral part of mathematics content across the three content strands: number and algebra, measurement and geometry, and statistics and probability. The proficiencies reinforce the significance of working mathematically within the content and describe how the content is explored or developed. They provide the language to build in the developmental aspects of the learning of mathematics. The achievement standards reflect the content and encompass the proficiencies.

At Year 10 level:

• Understanding includes applying the four operations to algebraic fractions, finding unknowns in formulas after substitution, making the connection between equations of relations and their graphs, comparing simple and compound interest in financial contexts, and determining probabilities of two- and three-step experiments
• Fluency includes factorising and expanding algebraic expressions, using a range of strategies to solve equations, and using calculations to investigate the shape of data sets
• Problem-solving includes calculating the surface area and volume of a diverse range of prisms to solve practical problems, finding unknown lengths and angles using applications of trigonometry, using algebraic and graphical techniques to find solutions to simultaneous equations and inequalities and investigating independence of events

In the Year 10 curriculum students explore systems at different scales and connect microscopic and macroscopic properties to explain phenomena. Students explore the biological, chemical, geological and physical evidence for different theories, such as the theories of natural selection and the Big Bang.

Students develop their understanding of atomic theory to understand relationships within the periodic table. They understand that motion and forces are related by applying physical laws. They learn about the relationships between aspects of the living, physical and chemical world that are applied to systems on a local and global scale and this enables them to predict how changes will affect equilibrium within these systems.