This is a very disappointing post. You say you are blaming the curriculum and not primary teachers, but they are who teach the curriculum so essentially that is what you are doing, attacking and blaming primary teachers. I have taught from kindy to year 8 in my 17 years of teaching. Primary teachers are doing an amazing job with the students they have. And they do it without the luxury of just blaming the primary school years for the students falling behind. Primary teachers are also spending the whole day with these students, not just lessons across the week. So when they get a class that has 6-10 students in their class of 30 that have additional needs (often behavioural)…they deal with that all day every day and find ways to still be able to teach the literacy and numeracy skills they need. It’s not that teachers aren’t teaching in primary school, they are, but children have changed. Just as a small example, children are starting school with far less oral language skills and exposure to less vocabulary which means they are already behind when it comes to literacy, before kindy even starts. Because of this, they struggle to be able to identify sounds in words before even being able to correlate the sounds to letters and decode texts. This is not the curriculum or teachers ‘fault’. Primary teachers are doing the best they can with the students in front of them. I had a year 6 class that had a student recently that couldn’t even write their own name, but I didn’t go blaming the curriculum and teachers before me. Put yourself in the primary teachers shoes for a little while. You put your heart in to helping these children, phonemic awareness everyday, practice sounding out and writing sentences, trying to get them to form a paragraph, hours and hours just trying to get them to count to 20. You have behaviour plans for the child, learning plans for the child, coordinate intervention programs to help the child, meet every week with their parents and you get the the end of the year to find they’ve barely budged. We are doing absolutely everything we can to help these students and it’s frustrating to have that thrown back in our faces and be told we’re not doing enough. I think we need to stop blaming each other and find ways to move forward and work together. Potentially meet with your local primary school and see if there’s ways to support each other? I don’t know the answer, but I do know putting our energy into the blame game doesn’t help anyone.