Making sense of Curricular Reforms 2025

THE Ministry of Education, Higher Education, and Vocational Education (MoE) has unveiled what they call a major reform agenda to reshape the future of Sri Lankan education, titled Transform Education: Transform Sri Lanka, in the Parliament of Sri Lanka on 11 July 2025.

- By Dr. Sujata Gamage

The reform agenda has been presented as a PowerPoint and a PowerPoint only, a first for such an important reform agenda in the history of Parliament, if I am not mistaken. Whatever the format, we should be grateful to the present Government and the Minister for Education for giving leadership at this time to a stalled curricular reform process.

However, unveiling of this PowerPoint is really a nonevent, in my opinion. As noted in the presentation, these curricular reforms have been ongoing since 2019 or before. The impact of the reforms will not be felt until 2029 and the full impact not until 2031. The textbooks and teacher guides have already been printed and piloted for implementation in Grades one and six, respectively, for 2026. A ceremony to give the blessing of the Government and a progress report at the end of one year would have been more appropriate.

Nonevent or not, the whole country is engaged in animated discussions with only a PowerPoint in hand. In the past few days, I too have been asked to comment on new education reforms, and I have been responding as best I could, confident with the background information to which I was privy as a member of a subcommittee to draft the interim report and subsequently a member of the committee to implement the National Education Policy Framework 2023-2033 of the previous regime.

As I went into details of the present reform, I was happy about the proposals for assessments, but the content left me deeply worried. The present content includes six essential subjects offered as school-wide as 10 subjects, and 41 elective subjects organised as three baskets (Figure 1).