My school is currently at Topic 2, wrapping up on Australia's trade and financial flows and moving into exchange rates. I think today we also touched on Inflation (in topic 3) and Monetary policy (topic 4), just some articles on it and discussion is all. Concurrently, we're working on our case studies on an economy other than Australia.
I'm not sure where that puts us in relation to other schools, I don't feel we're behind... possibly a bit ahead. I dunno.
I don't know about your 2nd question... for one thing, I haven't studied the whole syllabus yet, so I wouldn't know. And I tend to find alot of concepts hard, but work my way through them gradually.