NCTB to bring major change in curriculum

The government has formulated a time-befitting curriculum, bringing major changes in the existing education system with emphasis on classroom activities.

The National Curriculum and Textbook Board (NCTB) have already developed a curriculum from the pre-primary to higher secondary levels for ensuring quality education for the new generation.

NCTB officials said the initiative to develop the world-class curriculum has been taken to face challenges of a fourth industrial revolution and produce skilled manpower in the country.

The new curriculum will emphasise classroom activities and also reduce the numbers of textbooks and public examinations at secondary level.

The newly-developed NCTB curriculum framework has recommended that public examinations should not be held up to Class-X and students should not be divided into groups (science, humanities and business studies) from Class-IX.

The new guidelines have recommended introducing no textbooks at pre-primary level and holding no annual exams unto Class-II but to evaluate students’ class performance applying continuous assessment.

The new framework would require school authorities to employ continuous assessment based on daily classroom activities and hold examinations to evaluate students starting from Class-III.

The continuous assessment method would be applied till Class-X while students would appear at public examinations in five subjects --Bengali, English, mathematics, social science and science.

The students from Class-VI to Class-X at present studied 12 to 14 subjects but they would study 10 textbooks in each of these classes after the introduction of the new curriculum. However, some textbooks will cover several subjects.
The students will study 10 subjects from Class-VI to Class XI which also state that in Class-XI and Class-XII, children would choose the disciplines as per their aspiration but would study Bengali, English and ICT as compulsory subjects.

NCTB Chairman Prof Narayan Chandra Saha said, “We’re developing a time-befitting curriculum aiming to enhance the skills of children to meet challenges of fourth industrial revolution and produce skilled manpower.

“We’re now evaluating the formulated new curriculum taking opinions and it will be placed before the National Curriculum Coordination Committee (NCCC) for final approval.”

“After the approval, we will start developing curriculums for each class and would prepare syllabuses and publish textbooks based on the new curriculum,” said Prof Narayan.

Education Minister Dr Dipu Moni has recently told the parliament that the textbooks based on the latest curriculums would be distributed from 2022 and the groupings based on science, humanities and business studies from Class IX would be abolished the same year.

Meanwhile, educationists have welcomed the recommendations for curtailing the primary education completion (PEC) examinations and junior school certificate (JSC) examinations in the curriculum guidelines.

Rasheda K. Choudhury, executive director of the Campaign for Popular Education (CAMPE), said the recommendation on curtailing the public examinations like PEC and JSC in secondary level is a good move.

She said, “The Covid-19 situation has shown the inequality of our education system. The inequality will be reduced if we are able to ensure an integrated and time-befitting curriculum for students. But there are challenges.”

The educationist said, “First of all we have to create teachers and the textbooks will have to introduce properly following the curriculum while the capacity of educational institutions must be increased. We need to invest to face these three challenges while we need to ensure transparency and accountability to reap the benefits of investment.”

About the initiative to abolish students’ groups at secondary level, Rasheda said, “There is no division at this level in any country while the directive of our education policy was that there will be no division.”

Earlier, the government changed the curriculum in 2012 from the primary to higher secondary levels in the country.

The NCTB in 2017 initiated the new curriculum development project and set a target of publishing new textbooks in 2021. But they would not be able to meet the target due to the COVID-19 pandemic.