The six-month review of the national curriculum will cost $300,000, and Education Minister Christopher Pyne's reviewers will pocket up to $25,000 each for their work.
The reviewers, former teacher and Liberal staffer Kevin Donnelly and business professor Ken Wiltshire, are yet to meet the expert body that has spent six years developing the curriculum.
But they are working through more than 650 submissions and are expected to spend March in consultations.
Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) head Rob Randall expects to meet the reviewers towards the end of their inquiries.
"We've had no meetings with the reviewers at this point in time," Mr Randall told a Senate estimates hearing on Wednesday.
"Once they've drawn some things together, it makes sense that they will come back and talk to us to check out those things and we'll add to it."
The committee heard the government had allocated $300,000 for the review, which was announced in January.
Dr Donnelly and Professor Wiltshire will be paid $429 a day, and their final report is due by July 31.
The minister says the curriculum is too rigid and prescriptive, and he wants a more orthodox system free of what he calls "partisan bias".
Dr Donnelly and Prof Wiltshire have also been critical of what they see as a leftist cultural agenda in schools.
Australian Greens senator Penny Wright says the "rushed and politicised" review is a waste of money.
"This review is nothing more than an ideological exercise by the minister based on his own paranoia about a `left-wing bias' in schools," she said in a statement.
"How much money will Christopher Pyne spend just to hear what he wants to hear?"
Mr Randall told the committee the curriculum development was "an extensive, rigorous process" that took two or three years for each subject.
ACARA received more than 17,000 submissions during that process.
But he would not comment on whether six months would be long enough to implement any changes the review might suggest, saying it was not appropriate to speculate on time frames without knowing the recommendations.
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