New Educational Curriculum in Nigeria: An Educational or Political Decision?

In September 2025, the Federal Government of Nigeria rolled out a revised national curriculum, effective immediately in the 2025/2026 academic session. The headlines were bold: reduced subject overload, greater focus on digital literacy, AI, vocational skills, and trade readiness. On the surface, this looks like a long-awaited modernization of Nigeria’s education system.

But as one who has spent close to thirty years in the trenches of education governance and child safeguarding, working with UNICEF, the British Council, SOS Children’s Villages, state governments, and countless private and public schools, I must ask: is this truly an educational decision, or is it more political than we care to admit?

The Promise of Reform

The revised curriculum offers several commendable features:

• A leaner subject load to ease pressure on pupils.
• A stronger focus on practical and vocational subjects at the junior secondary level, from fashion design to solar installation.
• New emphasis on digital literacy, programming, AI, and cybersecurity at the senior secondary level.
• A supposed alignment with 21st-century global skills.

On paper, these are positive moves. No one disputes that Nigerian children need to be future-ready in a digital and innovation-driven world.

But curriculum alone does not educate children. Safety, structure, and systems do. And here lies the problem: the new curriculum seems to have been announced in a political rush, without the serious groundwork needed for genuine educational transformation.

Seven Gaps Too Obvious to Ignore

1. Unrealistic Timeframe: The curriculum was announced just weeks before implementation. Schools were given virtually no time to retool timetables, source materials, or train teachers. Reform of this magnitude demands years of piloting, not weeks of politicking.
2. Infrastructure Deficit: How many government schools currently have reliable ICT labs, safe vocational workshops, or even enough classrooms? Without parallel investment in infrastructure, especially in rural areas, a shiny new curriculum remains a paper promise.
3. Exclusion of Children’s Voices: The Child Rights Act of 2003 guarantees children the right to participation in decisions affecting them. Yet in the design of this curriculum, where are their voices? What consultations were held with learners themselves about what skills and protections they need?
4. Teacher Preparation Gap: The best curriculum will fail in the hands of untrained teachers. Where are the clear, published plans for nationwide teacher training, subject by subject, hour by hour? Announcements of “capacity building” are not enough. Nigerian educators deserve detailed training pathways, not vague headlines.
5. Blindness to Out-of-School Children: UNESCO still records over 20 million Nigerian children out of school. How does this curriculum address their plight? Reforming what is taught to those inside classrooms is meaningless if a third of our children remain outside them.
6. Parental Exclusion: Parents are the first educators. Yet the rollout provides no structured parent-education component—no toolkits, no guides, no forums, to help families support new subjects like coding or vocational tasks, or to reinforce digital safety at home.
7. Safeguarding Left Out: Perhaps most alarming, the curriculum ignores safeguarding. With new trade subjects exposing children to external instructors, and new digital subjects exposing them to online risks, child protection should have been embedded at the core. Instead, it is absent. A curriculum without safeguarding is a car without brakes.

Education or Politics?

These gaps are not minor oversights. They are structural failures. They suggest that the curriculum rollout is more political than educational: an announcement first, details later. But education does not work that way. Education requires preparation, systems, and accountability.

For decades, government has played a haphazard role both as owner and as regulator of schools. The result has been uneven standards, weak accountability, and a widening gap between policy pronouncements and classroom realities. This new curriculum, unless grounded in a safeguarding-first approach, risks becoming another exercise in political box-ticking.

The Way Forward

Reform is still possible, but it requires honesty and courage. Here are three urgent steps:

1. Publish a National Rollout Framework. A dated, transparent plan that details timelines for each subject, state by state, with clear milestones for training, materials, and infrastructure.
2. Embed Child Safeguarding and Protection. Every new subject, especially digital and vocational, must come with explicit safety protocols: safer recruitment of instructors, online protection modules, mandatory safeguarding training for boards, staff, and parents.
3. Engage Parents and Children. Give parents resources to support their children’s learning and digital safety. Involve students in shaping how the curriculum is taught and evaluated. Their participation is a right, not a courtesy.

A Simple Truth

The gaps are too many to suggest any real seriousness on the part of government. It is like a professor of mathematics struggling with the answer to 2 + 2. Until these obvious lapses are fixed, government actions will remain political gestures, not genuine educational commitments.

Beyond policy, the number one responsibility of every school is to protect children. When children do not feel safe, both learning and behavior are compromised. Safety is not optional; it is foundational.

That is why, in our Science of School Safety program at LawGuard360®, we emphasize the Culture–System Synergy approach: culture, system, policy, processes, training, monitoring, and accountability, all anchored in safeguarding.

Conclusion

Nigeria’s children deserve more than announcements. They deserve safety, dignity, and a curriculum that is not only modern but meaningful.

So I return to my original question: is the new curriculum an educational decision or a political one?

The answer will be revealed not in government speeches but in the lived experiences of our precious children—in classrooms, in workshops, and in the digital spaces where they remain most vulnerable due to adult irresponsibility.

For now, the burden is on government to prove that this is not just politics dressed as education, and the duty is on us to keep asking the critical questions.

Do have an INSPIRED weekend with the family.