Reform, Reverse, Repeat: A Way Out of School Curriculum Cycle

Bangladesh does not lack awareness of what modern education requires. Today’s economy rewards people who can solve problems, think critically, communicate, empathise, adapt and take initiative. Schools must build these competencies alongside technical literacy, not merely transmit knowledge.
Success depends not only on a curriculum’s design but also on infrastructure, teacher readiness and parents’ and employers’ confidence. Bangladesh has repeatedly introduced new approaches, yet many were launched without adequate infrastructure, prepared teachers or real consultation. Few were carried through as intended, and fewer still survived the government that launched them.
The 2021 National Curriculum Framework sought to replace rote memorisation with competency-based learning through project work and continuous assessment. Thoughtful on paper, it collapsed in practice as teachers were undertrained, classes remained enormous, and textbooks were riddled with errors. By January 2025, the interim government had reverted secondary education to the 2012 curriculum.
For 2027, National Curriculum and Textbook Board (NCTB) is revising textbooks and introducing four new compulsory books for Classes IV and VI, assessed continuously rather than through annual examinations; a more extensive revision is planned for 2028. Whether it succeeds or repeats the cycle of reform, struggle and reversal depends on what is done before it begins.

This pattern is not evidence that the goals were wrong; the 2021 framework failed in delivery, not aim. These competencies are what a fast-changing economy increasingly rewards; retreating to 2012 restores familiarity but not these skills. The framework could have been deferred rather than reverted. The lesson is to change the method, the sequence and the ownership.
A bounded pilot creates an identifiable target — a named batch of schools — and a verdict a critic or successor government can seize on. One alternative is to enrol every school nationally from the start, staggering start dates by district or board rather than drawing a pilot-versus-everyone-else line, since training every teacher simultaneously is impossible anyway.
Bangladesh has already run something close to this design, and it did not survive. The 2021 framework’s implementation was itself staggered by class — classes I, VI and VII in 2023, then II, III, VIII and IX in 2024. Every student was ‘in’; there was no pilot-verdict moment. It made no difference. Specific chapters were attacked and withdrawn within months – the evolution section, ‘Sharifa’s story’, a plagiarised science textbook – and after the 2024 change of government, authorities reverted the entire framework, not one component. Two years of national, staggered rollout were unwound in one decision.
Staggering answers a logistics problem, not a political one. What brought the framework down was content and ideology, not which schools were included – and a longer rollout gives such controversy more waves to recur in. The reversal was triggered by a government with every incentive to repudiate its predecessor’s reform, regardless of progress. Staging nationally removes neither trigger, and it forfeits a real comparison group, since ‘readiness’-based sequencing usually just sends better-resourced schools first. Phasing by grade remains sensible for managing capacity, but it cannot substitute for insulating the reform from politics.
Bangladesh has piloted reforms before, but too thinly and always within reach of whichever ministry or government was running them. The 2022 pilot covered only 62 secondary schools; a planned primary-school pilot never started because the ministry delayed the budget; teachers received a two-hour online orientation. A pilot must be funded, representative and insulated from a ministry withholding money and a government withholding continuity.
The 2028 revision should be piloted within the existing examination system, since the nine general boards share a common SSC paper. Four things would make this workable. First, use 2027 as a preparation year that treats teacher training as two tasks: retraining serving teachers and – untried so far – having teacher-training colleges revise their own curricula first so that new teachers arrive already fluent rather than needing conversion training later. Textbooks should be corrected before printing, and assessment design agreed across boards. Second, begin where there is no public examination: in Grades 6-8, pilot schools can test new methods without affecting results. Third, in Grades 9-10, change practice but not the paper — pilot students sit the same SSC exam while school-based assessments run alongside for research. If evidence is strong, weighting could later apply system-wide. Fourth, put the pilot’s oversight and budget outside the ministry that runs it, monitored by an independent commission that does not answer solely to whoever is in office when results arrive. Given three curricula discarded in five years, benchmarks should be published in a form that survives a change of government.
The sample should span all boards, urban and rural, and government and non-government schools; madrasas and technical institutions should be studied separately. Since SSC results alone cannot show critical thinking or collaboration, an independent body should also run a low-stakes skills assessment comparing pilot and non-pilot schools, with expansion tied to agreed benchmarks — not to something other than evidence, as happened in 2024.
A curriculum can specify the right competencies but cannot create them on paper. The 2028 reform needs the government to build foundations first, test changes in a limited, representative set of schools, and anchor the evidence somewhere sustainable enough to outlast any single administration. What Bangladesh needs is not another cycle of reform and reversal but continuity of purpose and institutions strong enough to hold it steady across a change in leadership.
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The writer is Distinguished Professor at Eastern University and former Vice Chancellor at East West University, Bangladesh