OUR PROGRAMMEOur curriculum was not designed to “match” the schools. It was designed to lead them.
The Foci Education curriculum is a proprietary curriculum, probably the first of its kind for a tutoring centre, which spans Year 2 to Year 12. It is not a term-by-term response to what schools are teaching — it is a ten-year architecture, built to develop the kind of reader, writer, and thinker who arrives at every English task with something already in place.
Each year builds on the last. The units grow harder. The texts demand more. The thinking becomes more precise. What stays constant is the belief that language is not a school skill — it is the skill that makes everything else possible.
Primary School — Years 2 to 6
Four themes organise every year of the primary curriculum. They do not change from Kindergarten to Year 6. What changes is the depth at which students encounter them. These foundations reflect what we believe shapes a strong young learner: not just literacy, but curiosity, empathy, and an early sense of the world beyond themselves. Kindergarten and Year 1 do not have published unit names. Students in Stage 1 work across phonics, grammar, early reading, and the foundations of written expression within the four themes.
PRIMARY SCHOOL PROGRAMME
Family and Friends
Stories about belonging and relationship — told first through picture books, and by Year 6, through questions of identity, legacy, and what we owe to the people around us.
Worlds Around Me
The physical and social world as a subject of study — cities, ecology, history, place. Students learn to look at the world they already inhabit and describe it precisely.
Australian Values
What it means to live here. The curriculum addresses Australian history, democratic life, fairness, and civic identity — and lets students form their own views about what those things require.
Imaginary Worlds
Fiction, mythology, and speculative narrative. Students read across genres and learn to write within them — developing the craft of storytelling alongside the analytical work of the rest of the programme.
YEARS 2-6
The Unit list
Our primary program begins in Kindergarten. It is not preparation for tutoring. It is the first layer of a ten-year curriculum, designed to produce students who read widely, write with confidence, and think before they speak.
Four themes run across every year of primary: Family and Friends, Worlds Around Me, Australian Values, and Imaginary Worlds. Each stage returns to these themes through more complex texts and harder questions. Alongside them, the curriculum teaches the mechanics explicitly — phonics and grammar in Stage 1, reading and parts of speech in Stage 2, sentence construction and opinion in Stage 3.
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Recipe for Relationships
Cycles and Cities
The Rhythm of Australia
Deep Sea to Deep Space
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Circles of Storytelling
Wild Australia
Many Voices, One Country
Myths, Magic, Machines
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Found Families
Environmental Stewardship
Gold, Grit & The Fair Go
Realms and Riddles
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Lineage and Legacy
Truth vs Trends
The Great Debate
The Other Side
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Rites of Passage
Global Citizens
Issues of Identity
The Art of the Twist
Junior High School — Years 7 to 10
Our Secondary Program is designed to guide students through the most significant academic transition of their schooling — from foundational literacy to analytical, discursive, and expressive control of language. By returning to these foundations each year, students build confidence in creative and discursive expression, sharpen their analytical voice, and develop the linguistic and conceptual fluency required for the demands of Stage 6 English and beyond. Across Years 7 to 10, students progress through a vertically scaffolded curriculum organised around five enduring focus areas:
Discursive Writing
Argument, persuasion, and the structure of ideas on the page. Students learn to take a position and defend it — in essays, speeches, and analytical responses — with precision and without cliché.
Contemporary Australian Voices
Literature and media that reflect the present. Students read Australian writers — including First Nations writers, migrant writers, and voices that sit outside the canonical tradition — and understand what makes a literary culture plural.
Creative Writing
Fiction, narrative, and literary craft. Students develop voice, structure, and technique across a range of modes — and learn that writing well imaginatively and writing well analytically are not separate skills.
Cosmopolitan Voices
Literature from beyond the English-speaking world. Students read across translation and across cultures — encountering the universal questions that great writing asks, from perspectives that expand what English can hold.
Advertising and Journalism
Language as power. Students study the media they already consume — advertising, news, digital content — and develop the critical vocabulary to read it. They also write in these forms.
YEARS 7-10
The Unit List
Five foundations organise the secondary curriculum. Students encounter all five every year, across four terms, with each foundation carrying a different entry point to English as a discipline.
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Language Fundamentals (CDPA)
Identity and Expression
Perspectives and Culture
Language and Persuasion
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Language and Contemporary Voices
Visual Literacy – Art, Context and Meaning
Film Study: Bong Joon Ho's Parasite
The Power of Media
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Language and Cosmopolitanism
Shakespearean Romance
Poetry and Social Commentary
Narrativising the Self – Asian-Australian Literature
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Language and Journalism
Shakespearean Tragedy
Ways of Thinking – Post-colonialism, Feminism, Marxism
Humans as Capital – Media, Money and the Self
Year 11-12
Senior High School
Higher School Certificate
The HSC is a prescribed course. NESA (the New South Wales Education Standards Authority — the independent statutory authority in NSW responsible for setting and monitoring the standards of education in New South Wales, Australia) sets the modules, exams and list of books and texts all students study , and every school and tutoring centre in New South Wales teaches within and to the same framework. We know it well — and we do not pretend that the programme we offer at senior level is something we designed from scratch.
What we offer is something harder to acquire than a unit list. By the time a Foci Education student reaches Year 11, they have been writing analytically for five years. They have encountered critical theory — post-colonialism, feminism, Marxist readings of media — before most of their peers have heard the terms. They have read Shakespeare twice: once for the grammar of romantic love, once for the structure of tragedy. They have a formed critical voice, because we have spent years helping them find it.
The coutnless HSC modules — across Standard, Advanced and Extension 1 and 2 English — are not obstacles for a student who already knows how to think. They are opportunities. Our senior classes are small, led by a principal tutor, and built around close reading, sustained argument, and writing under conditions that match or exceed what the HSC requires. The mark band is the outcome. The thinking — already in place — is the work.
The International Baccalaureate
The IB Language A course asks something different of students — sustained independent inquiry, comparative analysis across cultures and literary traditions, and writing evaluated not just for correctness but for intellectual reach. These are not new demands for a Foci student. The curriculum they have moved through since secondary school has been building exactly this capacity. IB preparation at Foci runs alongside the same principal-led format: small groups, close reading, and direct engagement with the assessment criteria that determine the final grade.
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Common Module: Reading to Write
Module A: Narratives that Shape Our World
Module B: Close Study of Literature
Module C: Craft of Writing
English Extension 1 Preliminary: Texts, Culture and Values
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Common Module: Texts and Human Experiences
Module A: Textual Conversations
Module B: Critical Study of Literature
Module C: The Craft of Writing
English Extension 1 HSC: Literary Worlds
English Extension 2 HSC: Major Work — extended independent writing project, including genre study, drafting, and critical reflection
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Paper 1: Common Module — unseen text analysis and short-answer response
Paper 2: Modules A, B, and C — extended essay responses
Extension 1 Examination: 1 hour 30 minutes, single extended response
Extension 2: Major Work submitted prior to the HSC examination period
The Lectern
Every unit in our curriculum connects to a world outside the classroom. The Lectern opens that door.
Launched in 2026, The Lectern is a year-long guest programme that brings practising professionals into the room with Foci students — artists, journalists, lawyers, writers, filmmakers, thinkers. Each guest appears for one to two lessons per term, aligned with the unit being taught. No formal qualifications are required. What is required is real expertise, and something worth saying to a sharp room.
A journalist for the Advertising & Journalism term. A filmmaker for the Bong Joon Ho unit. A writer for Narrativising the Self. The guest does not teach the curriculum — they demonstrate what it looks like when the thinking leaves the classroom and enters a life.
The Lectern runs across the full academic year, for every year level in the secondary programme.
Why all of this matters.
The student who arrives already thinking — Year 7
A Foci Education student who begins high school having come through the primary curriculum arrives differently. Not just with more reading behind them — with a framework. Over five years, they have encountered the same four themes at increasing depth: what belonging looks like, what the world around them contains, what Australian life means, and what fiction asks of a reader. The units have changed each year. The thinking has compounded.
By Year 7, the architecture of secondary English — argument, close reading, analytical response — does not arrive as something new. The foundations were already being laid in Year 2.
Literacy gets you to the HSC. Literature gets you through it — Year 11
Consider what a student who has been through the full Foci secondary programme brings to Year 11. They have read Shakespeare twice — once for the grammar of romantic love, once for the architecture of tragedy. They have encountered post-colonial theory, feminist criticism, and Marxist readings of media and consumption before most of their peers have heard the terms. They have written analytically since Year 7 and studied the craft of creative writing alongside it.
This is the distinction Foci teaches: not literacy, but literature. Literacy is the capacity to read and write. Literature is the capacity to think with what you have read — to bring a formed critical sensibility to any text, any module, any unseen question. The difference between these two outcomes is not a small one. The curriculum was not built to produce students who are ready for Year 12. It was built to produce students who are ready for anything Year 12 asks.