In the current edition of Curriculum Leadership, Professor Lyn Yates outlines a range of issues facing curriculum researchers, policy makers and leaders within schools. Challenges are posed by the changing forms of knowledge, work, and social identities; by schools' role as 'social fixers'; by demands that schools achieve equal outcomes for all students while also ranking and selecting them for higher study or work; and by demands that schools prepare flexible, autonomous lifelong learners.

Some of the key problems being faced in schools, according to Professor Yates, are:

• The enormous gap between rhetoric and reality
• Too much emphasis on hardware, too little on professional space to work well with the technology
• Lack of adequate attention to inequalities
• The struggle with what to emphasize and how to be systematic with curriculum.

Professor Lyn Yates is the newly appointed Chair of Curriculum at the University of Melbourne.

This article is an edited extract from her inaugural professorial lecture for the Faculty of Education Dean's lecture series

To view the first article in the two part series, follow the link to the Curriculum Leadership Website.