In this paper, we trace the emergence of this positioning of teachers’ curriculum work, highlighting a trajectory in which discussions of centralised curriculum planning and resourcing move from a representation of curriculum as a lever of system improvement, through to its current representation as a solution to workload. To develop this analysis, we first produced a subset of newspaper articles from the Australian Teacher Corpus Footnote1(Mockler, 2022) which included both the terms workload and lesson plan*Footnote2, and were published between 2019 and 2023. We then worked backwards from these media articles to identify and closely read the reports they referenced, considering how these have shaped public discussion through two consecutive and evolving themes: curriculum as a lever of system improvement and curriculum as a workload solution. Contrary to these representations, however, we argue that teachers’ curriculum work, undertaken both collaboratively and individually, is central rather than incidental to their work and identities, and that moves to ‘outsource’ are not likely to meaningfully address teachers’ workload concerns. In addition, such shifts raise concerns regarding the de-professionalisation of teachers and both new and ongoing forms of privatisation and commercialisation of schooling.