Pencilwick is not affiliated with, or endorsed by, ACARA. The full notice is below.
How Pencilwick follows the Australian Curriculum
Pencilwick is mapped to the Australian Curriculum Version 9.0 from Foundation to Year 10, one content description at a time. Here’s what that means, where states differ, and the attribution ACARA asks for.
ACARA says alignment should be checked against content descriptions and achievement standards, not the elaborations, which are optional examples.
How alignment works
The curriculum has three parts that matter here:
- Content descriptions say what teachers must teach. Each has a code.
- Achievement standards describe the quality of learning expected by the end of each year or band.
- Elaborations are optional teaching examples that ACARA provides.
Every Pencilwick lesson, practice set, worksheet question and Snap & Solve result is tagged to the content description it teaches. That tag is what fills a student’s progress, a parent’s weekly report and a teacher’s heat map.
Reading a code
Take AC9M8A02. AC9 is the Australian Curriculum Version 9, M is Mathematics, 8 is Year 8, A is the Algebra strand and 02 is the second content description in that strand: “graph linear relations on the Cartesian plane using digital tools where appropriate; solve linear equations and one-variable inequalities using graphical and algebraic techniques; verify solutions by substitution”.
Subjects taught in two-year bands, such as Technologies, Health and Physical Education and The Arts, use the upper year of the band in their codes, so a 10 means Years 9 and 10.
Pencilwick uses your state’s name for the first year of school everywhere in the app.
Year names and curriculum in each state
Every state and territory teaches from the national curriculum, but some adapt it. Most content lines up; where it doesn’t, Pencilwick says so.
| State or territory | First year of school | What schools teach, Foundation to Year 10 |
|---|---|---|
| Western Australia | Pre-primary | The Western Australian Curriculum, which SCSA adopts and adapts from v9.0. It doesn’t use content description codes, so we map WA content to the matching national codes. |
| New South Wales | Kindergarten | NESA’s own K–10 syllabuses, organised in stages, with their own outcome codes. A NSW mapping is in progress. |
| Victoria | Prep (Foundation) | The Victorian Curriculum F–10 Version 2.0, built mostly from v9.0, organised in levels. A Victorian mapping is in progress. |
| Queensland | Prep | The Australian Curriculum v9.0, being implemented in stages to 2027. |
| South Australia | Reception | Public schools use the South Australian Curriculum for Public Education, adapted from v9.0. Catholic and independent schools use v9.0. |
| Tasmania | Prep | The Australian Curriculum v9.0. |
| Australian Capital Territory | Kindergarten | The Australian Curriculum learning areas. |
| Northern Territory | Transition | The Australian Curriculum. |
Years 11 and 12
Version 9.0 stops at Year 10. Senior courses are set by each state: WACE in Western Australia, the HSC in New South Wales, VCE in Victoria, QCE in Queensland, SACE in South Australia, TCE in Tasmania, the ACT Senior Secondary Certificate and NTCET in the Northern Territory. Pencilwick supports senior students through the tutor, Snap & Solve, and notes and flashcards made from their own course materials. Course-by-course mappings are being added.
Languages have several sequences and pathways, which is why some appear more than once in ACARA’s data.
What’s in Pencilwick’s curriculum map
Every content description and elaboration of v9.0, downloaded from ACARA’s website on 9 October 2026: 2,678 content descriptions in all.
| Learning area | Subject | Years | Content descriptions | Elaborations |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| English | English | F–10 | 284 | 744 |
| Mathematics | Mathematics | F–10 | 240 | 1,049 |
| Science | Science | F–10 | 152 | 895 |
| Humanities and Social Sciences | HASS F–6 | F–6 | 89 | 340 |
| Civics and Citizenship | 7–10 | 42 | 148 | |
| Economics and Business | 7–10 | 40 | 148 | |
| Geography | 7–10 | 57 | 211 | |
| History | 7–10 | 105 | 475 | |
| Technologies | Design and Technologies | F–10 | 51 | 257 |
| Digital Technologies | F–10 | 73 | 279 | |
| Health and Physical Education | Health and Physical Education | F–10 | 97 | 435 |
| The Arts | Dance | F–10 | 33 | 155 |
| Drama | F–10 | 33 | 171 | |
| Media Arts | F–10 | 33 | 187 | |
| Music | F–10 | 33 | 183 | |
| Visual Arts | F–10 | 33 | 200 | |
| Languages | Arabic | F–10 | 68 | 615 |
| Auslan | F–10 | 132 | 1,293 | |
| Chinese | F–10 | 134 | 1,007 | |
| Classical Greek | 7–10 | 14 | 144 | |
| Framework for Aboriginal Languages and Torres Strait Islander Languages | F–10 | 159 | 1,423 | |
| Framework for Classical Languages | 7–10 | 14 | 84 | |
| French | F–10 | 68 | 538 | |
| German | F–10 | 68 | 566 | |
| Hindi | F–10 | 68 | 613 | |
| Indonesian | F–10 | 68 | 607 | |
| Italian | F–10 | 68 | 553 | |
| Japanese | F–10 | 68 | 495 | |
| Korean | F–10 | 68 | 487 | |
| Latin | 7–10 | 14 | 138 | |
| Modern Greek | F–10 | 68 | 580 | |
| Spanish | F–10 | 68 | 589 | |
| Turkish | F–10 | 68 | 670 | |
| Vietnamese | F–10 | 68 | 562 |
ACARA asks platforms to say how often they update and how devices stay in sync.
Keeping up to date
Pencilwick uses Version 9.0, downloaded on 9 October 2026. We check ACARA’s curriculum version history at the start of each school term and update Pencilwick within 30 days of any change.
Pencilwick is a web app. It doesn’t store the curriculum on your device, so everyone always sees the current version.
We don’t use ACARA’s logos or the Australian Curriculum logo. ACARA’s terms don’t allow them to be used.
Attribution and endorsement notice
Pencilwick uses Australian Curriculum material under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0), as allowed by ACARA’s copyright and terms of use.
© Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) 2010 to present, unless otherwise indicated. This material was downloaded from the Australian Curriculum website (Website) (accessed 9 October 2026) and was modified. The material is licensed under CC BY 4.0 Attribution 4.0 International Deed. Version updates are tracked in the ‘Curriculum version history’ section on the 'About the Australian Curriculum' page of the Australian Curriculum website.
ACARA does not endorse any product that uses the Australian Curriculum or make any representations as to the quality of such products. Any product that uses material published on this website should not be taken to be affiliated with ACARA or have the sponsorship or approval of ACARA. It is up to each person to make their own assessment of the product, taking into account matters including, but not limited to, the version number and the degree to which the materials align with the content descriptions and achievement standards (where relevant). Where there is a claim of alignment, it is important to check that the materials align with the content descriptions and achievement standards (endorsed by all education Ministers), not the elaborations (examples provided by ACARA).
We changed the format only. The data was restructured for Pencilwick, HTML tags were removed from some elaborations, and level descriptions were also rendered as plain text. The curriculum wording is unchanged.
Some elaborations describe Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledges. We follow ACARA’s guidance on Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property when we use or adapt that content.