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The proposed refined national curriculum for the next year is likely to be implemented in phases, said National Curriculum and Textbook Board officials.

‘In my opinion the curriculum should be implemented phase by phase,’ board chairman AKM Reazul Hassan told ¶¶Òõ¾«Æ· on Wednesday.

Education adviser Wahiduddin Mahmud would take the decision in this regard, he mentioned.

Saying that changing the whole curriculum at one go might result in shock wave among those involved, Reazul observed that the process should be gradual instead.

‘Instead of changing the entire curriculum after seven or eight years, if small changes are brought in every one or two years, the shock wave becomes tolerable,’ he observed.

After the ouster of the Sheikh Hasina-led Awami League regime in August last year, the succeeding interim government in September announced implementation of an entirely refined curriculum from 2026.

For the current year, the government returned to the 2012 curriculum by revising the textbooks, reintroducing the three-division-based system in Classes IX and X and the examination-based assessment method.

With all these decisions, the government virtually scrapped the latest national curriculum of 2023.

The situation has led to mounting pressure on the board officials as they have to work at top speed for revising the curriculum for 2026, while at the same time they are scrambling to distribute free textbooks for this year.

Till Wednesday about 11.01 crore out of total about 40.15 crore free textbooks were distributed among the students, said the board chairman.

The education adviser on January 7 said that he could not confirm when all students would get their textbooks this year, putting the delay down to the revision of the books, changes in both the syllabus and curriculum, increase in the number of textbooks and delay in printing.

NCTB member for curriculum Professor Robiul Kabir Chowdhury told ¶¶Òõ¾«Æ· on Wednesday that currently they were extremely busy with printing and distribution of the free textbooks.

Board officials said that 22 steps had to be followed before finalising a curriculum.

Professor Robiul said that they had started the work for refining the curriculum by engaging some experts to evaluate the global trend of curriculum and suggest ways to align the global trend with the local curriculum.

‘It’s a mammoth task,’ he said, adding, ‘curriculum is the constitution of an education system.’

The professor further said, ‘After we complete book distribution we will hold national workshops with all concerned, mostly the academicians, on need assessment and situation analysis.’

He also said that based on the need assessment a consensus would be reached and a total framework of the curriculum would be prepared.

They wanted to complete this work by this April, he added.

A senior board official, seeking anonymity, said that for distributing revised books in time in 2026 they would have to send the books for printing by this August.

‘The proposed revised curriculum is likely to be implemented in phases while we are depending on the opinions of the stakeholders in this regard,’ he said.

The latest 2023 curriculum was based on critical thinking, creativity, analytical ability, problem solving skill, collaboration skill, and experiential learning which were also used in the 2012 curriculum as these visions are universal, the board official explained.

Pointing at the differences between the two curricula, he said that in 2012, the books were content-focused, while in 2023, they focus on activity and experiential learning.

‘My opinion is, combining activity and experiential learning part of the 2023 curriculum with that of 2012 would be good,’ he added.

NCTB chairman Reazul Hassan emphasised an extensive discussion on curriculum review and said that as the government suspended the 2023 curriculum, it needed to form a committee to review the 2023 curriculum.

Earlier on September 28, 2024 the government cancelled the textbook review committee facing criticism from different Islamist parties and groups against two members of the committee—Dhaka University physics professor Md Kamrul Hassan and sociology associate professor Samina Luthfa.

Md Yeanur Rahman, senior assistant secretary of Secondary and Higher Education Division under the education ministry, told ¶¶Òõ¾«Æ· on Thursday that the committee had yet to be re-formed.

The government has two regular high-level National Curriculum Coordination Committees, responsible for the curricula’s final approval. One of these committees is under the ministry of primary and mass education and the other is under the education ministry, both headed by the secretaries of the respective ministry.