As part of the preparations, the piloting of the new curriculum will start at 62 secondary schools across the country once the educational institutions reopen after the end of the ongoing closure due to the coronavirus pandemic.

In-person classes at schools and colleges are likely to resume in March subject to the improvement in the country’s coronavirus situation. 

For implementation of the new curriculum, the National Curriculum and Textbook Board (NCTB) is working tirelessly to make everything ready — formulation of the curriculum, providing training for a number of teachers and writing of the new textbooks.

In September last year, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina approved the outline of the new curriculum, which is set to be implemented in phases from January 2023, and will fully be implemented by 2025.

The NCTB was supposed to begin phase-wise implementation of the new curriculum from January 2021 but the introduction of the new curriculum was delayed due to the Covid-19 situation.

Students of classes I, II, VI and VII will get books in January 2023 under the new curriculum and those of classes III, IV, VIII and IX in 2024. Students of grades V and X will get new books in January 2025.

Education Minister Dr Dipu Moni has said there is initiative in the new curriculum to make reading and learning enjoyable for children. They will learn in an enjoyable environment so that they can apply the acquired education in practical life.

She said the aim of the new curriculum is to create opportunities for everyone, which might be absent in the existing one. “We have the goal of fulfilling the global aspirations as we want to get to the right place. That’s why the experts are showing us the way through the new curriculum,” she said. 

Dipu Moni also said the new curriculum will reduce emphasis on memorisation and instead prioritise experiment -and activity-based learning where students will learn with enjoy.

Hailing the new curriculum, eminent writer Prof Muhammed Zafar Iqbal said, “Our children of the present society have not got childhood and adolescence like us. There’s no joy in the childhood of children due to the present education system. Parents are busy sending their children to coaching centres for good results.”

He said, “I always say don’t memorise but we see kids doing coaching, memorising guide books and textbooks. Now parents and teachers rebuke their children if they don’t get GPA-5 in the exam. As a result, many students commit suicide. This is a very bad thing.”

Talking to the Daily Sun, NCTB Chairman Prof Farhadul Islam said, “We’re taking all-out preparations to implement the new curriculum from the next year (2023).”

He said, “Our existing textbooks are 60 years old and basically the books had been written based on our rural economy. So, there is need to revise the textbooks putting emphasis on the present economy.”

Prof Farhad also said, “We don’t want the students undergo the pressure of learning. We want to give them education amid fanfare, replacing the memorisation-based system with one based on experiment and activities.”

“There’re lots of challenges of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and I hope the new curriculum will help students face those,” he added.

According to the new curriculum, the government will scrap any public exam before class X and also ensure no exams of any kind for students up to class III.

At present, the students need to sit for half-yearly and final exams every year but as per the new curriculum, the students will be evaluated based on continuous assessment until class III at schools.

For students of classes IV-VIII, 60 percent of the evaluation in Bangla, English, mathematics, social sciences and science will be done through continuous assessment (evaluation of regular school work) and the rest through ‘overall evaluation’ (exams).

For other subjects, the students of these classes will be evaluated based on continuous assessment.

Half the evaluation of Bangla, English, mathematics, social sciences and science of students of classes IX and X will be done through continuous assessment, and the rest will be done through exams.

The students will need to take public exams after class X based on the curriculum of that grade only and the SSC exams will be held on Bangla, English, mathematics, social sciences and science.

As per the new curriculum, there will be no more Primary Education Completion (PEC) examination after class V and no Junior School Certificate (JSC) exams for class VIII.

Students of grades IX and X will study 10 subjects — Bangla, English, mathematics, science, social sciences, ICT, religion, health studies, life and livelihood education, and art and culture studies.

The students will need to sit for public exams after classes XI and XII based on the curriculum of the respective classes. The HSC exams will take place in two phases, and the final results will be determined through combining the results of both the exams.

The 30 percent evaluation of compulsory subjects — Bangla, English, mathematics and ICT — of classes XI and XII will be done through continuous assessment, and the remaining 70 percent will be done through public exams.

Under the existing system, students of classes IX and X take the SSC exam on 10 papers after studying a syllabus for two years. They sit for the HSC exams on 12 papers after studying a two-year syllabus in classes XI and XII.In the existing curriculum, students have to choose the streams in class IX but the government is also going to introduce streams — science, humanities and business studies — from class XI in the new curriculum.

The students of classes XI and XII will study compulsory subjects — Bangla, English and ICT — and they will be able to choose three other subjects from any of three disciplines of science, humanities and business. They will also pick another subject from vocational courses.

The NCTB officials, however, said the key challenges are to change the mindset of guardians and students as they will want traditional memorisation-based system, while ensuring enough training for teachers.

The NCTB started the process of revising the current curriculum in 2018. The curriculum of the primary to higher secondary levels was last revised in 2012.