This paper will consider how the emergence of national curriculum policies over the past two decades have shaped key debates in what counts as curriculum making, with important implications for equity, access and inclusion in schools and other sites of education (Green et al., 2021; Priestley et al., 2021). Curriculum is fundamentally bound up with national identity and security (Green, 2018), in which the ‘tangled relationship between curriculum and democracy means that curriculum cannot be understood in isolation from the political, economic, social, and cultural conditions in which it is produced and practised’ (Reid & Thomson, 2003, p. xiv). As Pinar (2004) argued, curriculum requires making choices regarding what to remember about the past, beliefs for the present and hopes for the future. As such, the question of how nations frame national curriculum policies is crucial to understanding broader concerns of democratic participation, civic belonging, and social justice (Green, 2018; Mills et al., 2022, 2026). For example, the Australian federal, state and territory education ministers have committed to a curriculum that helps young people to become ‘committed to national values of democracy, equity and justice, and participate in Australia’s civic life’ (Council of Australian Governments, 2019, p. 8). However, Green (2018) raised an important concern regarding national curriculum, which necessarily creates ‘the limits of dissent, of participation, of social imagination’ (p. 274) available to its participants—students, teachers and school communities. We are mindful that ‘there are a multitude of possible curriculum responses to the question of how to provide all young people with high-quality and high-equity educational opportunities’ (Riddle et al., 2023, p. 140). This paper will examine the place of national curriculum policymaking in a volatile, uncertain complex and ambiguous world (Riddle, 2022; Shields, 2013), considering implications for a more socially just schooling that enables young people to thrive, not just survive, in the twenty-first century.

The paper will commence with a comparison of key macro curriculum policies from Asian–Pacific countries, including Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Japan to provide an international context before presenting a detailed case study of a national curriculum. The paper will closely examine the Australian Curriculum to illustrate how national curriculum policymaking influences, and is influenced by, discourses of nation-building, democracy, identity and culture in a world characterised by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. In addition to an analysis of key curriculum policy texts, official curriculum frameworks and other grey literature from curriculum authorities, education departments and policymakers, the paper will examine how the national curriculum has been represented by key political actors in mainstream media (i.e., news reports, press releases and media commentary), with a focus on how curriculum policymaking is intimately bound up with questions about democracy and curricular justice.

The paper will conclude with a set of propositions for engaging in national curriculum policymaking that support curricular justice and sustain democratic futures for all young people in a complex world. We contend that there is a need for more nuanced policy learning rather than policy borrowing (Mayer & Mills, 2021; Riddle et al., 2026), and that curriculum must become a critical site of international collaboration to increase global efforts to ensure that all young people are able to grow up in a world that is more inclusive, democratic and sustainable.

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