The 500-hour planning trap holding back Victorian senior faculties

Planning a year-long subject sequence is one of the heaviest workloads in education. Research from The Grattan Institute estimates it takes at least 500 hours to build a year's worth of sequenced materials for a single subject at a single year level.

In Victoria, the Department of Education developed Victorian Lesson Plans across F-10 English, Mathematics, Science, Design Technologies and Digital Technologies to support VTLM 2.0 implementation. That initiative recognised a clear truth: high-quality shared foundations save time and drive consistency across classrooms.

In senior secondary, however, those state lesson plans stop at Year 10. Senior teachers are left to translate 60-80 pages of detailed VCE study design entirely on their own.

"High-quality shared foundations save hundreds of hours of drafting, keeping strong teaching sequences intact even when staff changes occur."

Why private folders put faculties at risk

Because VCE course creation happens in parallel across schools, colleagues in neighbouring rooms often end up spending hundreds of hours building materials someone else has already made.

This creates two major risks for school leaders:

• Inconsistent student experiences: Pacing and resource quality vary depending on which teacher a student draws on their timetable.
• Knowledge loss: Workload is the top reason teachers cite when considering leaving the profession. When a teacher does move on, their refined classroom strategies go with them unless the faculty has a shared system to capture that knowledge.

Want to see how other Victorian faculties are cutting hundreds of hours from planning? The VCE Education Report breaks down the planning frameworks behind this article.

Building a shared departmental foundation

When a faculty shares a central curriculum foundation, teachers retain their pedagogical freedom so nobody rebuilds what a colleague has already built. Pacing is mapped directly to the VCE study design, leaving teachers free to focus on refining explanations and supporting students.

Atomi maps the subjects study design into a structured, well-paced sequence. Every topic includes short video lessons, interactive quizzes and worked examples. Teachers keep total pedagogical control to reorder topics, skip consolidated areas or add custom school assessments.

If a colleague joins or leaves the team, the sequence stays intact in a shared departmental hub, protecting outcomes for the long haul.

"Many of our teachers told us that they were using most of their time to find resources for their students' academic learning. This meant that they didn't have enough time to plan and effectively implement the other (holistic) areas of education that we pride ourselves on."
— Phillip Goodsell, Senior Coordinator and Teacher, School of Total Education (QLD)

Reclaim your faculty's planning time

Stop reinventing the VCE study design every year.

• Read the full white paper: See the planning research and faculty workload data behind this article.
• See it in action: Book a demo for your school today to explore Atomi's ready-to-use VCE course mapping.