The condensed curriculum: making space for holistic learning and accelerated education without compromising quality

• In Event: Accelerated Education as an Instrument of Disruption

Proposal

Nigeria is one of the countries in the world with a huge population of out-of-school children and youths (OOSCY)—about 20 million (UNESCO, 2022). A longstanding national problem, the situation worsened with the insurgency in the Northeast with the resulting closure of schools and displacement of many persons, including children and adolescents. Many of these children are yet to return to school due to continued terror attacks, poverty, socio-cultural factors, and other psychosocial harms arising from their having been out of school for many years and compounded by age-related constraints to starting or continuing schooling.
Many organizations have provided accelerated educational opportunities for children and youth who had no access to education, but there are no standardized national framework and curriculum for running these programmes, resulting, among other things, in a plethora of curricula with no government involvement. Also, most of these organizations have focused their activities in Northeast Nigeria, neglecting other regions.
Thus, the need for alternative, high-quality, equivalent basic education options for those at risk of perpetual school exclusion necessitated the birth of the Accelerated Basic Education Programme (ABEP). ABEP specifically targets out-of-school children aged 10 to 18 whose education was interrupted and are overage to continue schooling from where they stopped. It is also for those who have never been to school and are too old to start formal education from the foundation class (Primary 1). To maintain and ensure that the quality of the 9-Year national basic education curriculum is not compromised, the ABEP curriculum is structured into 3 levels: Level 1 to cover the curriculum contents of Primary 1 – 3; Level 2 to cover Primary 4 to 6; and Level 3 to cover Junior Secondary 1 to 3. Each level is designed to run for one academic year of 3 terms, like the regular school program, but with a flexible timetable in learner-friendly centers and variable pathways for entry and re-entry into the regular school.
To ensure effective collaboration and quality control, a Community of Practice (COP) to expand practice, enrich ideas, and provide solutions to the challenge of OOSCY was established. The COP, which comprises state and non-state actors, aims to identify gaps and co-create knowledge that will drive the development of educational models that serve the national peculiarities irrespective of region, culture, and varying socio-economic indices. The COP meets quarterly to share learning, review ABEP programme implementation at the organizational level, enrich ideas, and ensure that practices are holistic and adhere to the national implementation guidelines developed by COP members. This paper examines strategies we used to condense the official curriculum, maintaining its integrity and considers further the COP’s efforts to harmonize the implementation and monitoring of various accelerated initiatives that operate to address the menace of overage OOSCY in Nigeria.

Author

• Laban Laban Onisimus, Plan International Nigeria