Building intuitions about statistical inference based on resampling

Formal inference, which makes theoretical assumptions about distributions and applies hypothesis testing procedures with null and alternative hypotheses, is notoriously difficult for tertiary students to master. The debate about whether this content should appear in Years 11 and 12 of the Australian Curriculum: Mathematics has gone on for several years. If formal inference is not included in Years 11 and 12, what statistical content, if any, should there be? Should students continue learning more data handling skills, which are a feature of the F-10 curriculum (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority [ACARA], 2011)? Perhaps the focus should be on procedural aspects, such as correlation and lines of best fit, employing principles from calculus. Or perhaps the curriculum should drop statistics and focus on the more complex theoretical aspects of probability.