State minister says teaching the prescribed curriculum alone will not help children who have fallen behind

Government must prioritise giving children a strong foundation

Bangladesh's primary education system must shift SLIP funding from reimbursements to advance payments for genuine decentralisation.

Samir Ranjan Nath, programme head at the BRAC Institute of Educational Development, discusses learning gaps in primary education.

Primary education must be strengthened

The primary and mass education ministry has prepared draft guidelines for updating the primary curriculum, suggesting an approach that defines what children should know and the skills and competencies they should attain by the end of class-5.

Impressive progress has been made in Bangladesh’s primary education system over the past decades, bringing millions of children into classrooms and advancing national commitment to the UN’s SDG 4 of ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education for all.

Curriculum design to be completed within a year, with teacher training scheduled for 2027 and 2028

Without foundational skills, students cannot thrive in secondary education.

A recent proposal to base primary school admission on tests has raised concern as critics argue that forcing young children—who are just starting to explore and understand the world around them—into competitive exams ignores the true purpose of education.

“Who will pick up the duck’s photo?” The moment Rafia Sonamoni posed the question to a group of 26 children, four eager hands shot up, accompanied by excited shouts of, “I will!”

The government committee on primary education is set to recommend a classroom size of 30 so that teachers can give extra attention to weaker students to help with their learning.

To serve the purpose of education, meeting the parents' demands through focusing on learning outcomes and reforming the education system are the need of the hour.

The new norm for education should be people before profit, not the other way around.

Government has to look into the decline of students

It is believed that education, in the midst of global advances and challenges, remains the critical vehicle of empowerment.

The government has made a fresh move to extend primary education up to class-VIII, six years after missing the original deadline set in the National Education Policy.

The enchantment of statistics should not blind us to the sobering truth.

At least 18,465 non-government primary schools closed their doors for good in 2021 and 2022 due to what officials said were the impacts of Covid-19 pandemic.

The government aims to build a “Smart Bangladesh” by 2041, but without fixing our faulty public education system, how far can it achieve this goal? The human resources for Bangladesh’s future are being short-changed at the primary education level,  finds The Daily Star through visits to several schools right in the heart of the capital.