The government is reviewing the new curriculum to find out the areas that need improvement starting next year, a senior government official has said.
The Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education adopted the skills-based education curriculum in 2017 in order to produce learners with skills to solve problems rather than theorise issues.
But since the adoption of the new curriculum, parents and guardians have complained about the implementation of continuous activity learning assessment (CALA).
Speaking in an interview with State media on Wednesday, Primary and Secondary Education Deputy Minister Edgar Moyo said:
We are in the process of reviewing the education curriculum this year and this does not mean that we are changing it. We want to find things that need to be improved.
The review is about having a look at the curriculum on what it has achieved, its strengths and weaknesses since it was introduced.
We are going to be engaging teachers as represented by various layers such as the Nation Association of Secondary Schools (NASH), the National Association of Primary Schools (NAPH), and education officers.
It will include the whole structure of the education value chain including parents and the industry, the higher and tertiary education sector to say what do you make of the product that we are providing you?
We want to establish if there are any areas that need to be modified so we are going to be engaging farmers, and the Zimbabwe Coalition of Education among other stakeholders.
Moyo added that the government wants the curriculum to be adaptive to the ever-changing global industrial and economic trends. He said:
So, we want them to speak to the issues of the education curriculum. We want to smoothen it up so that it responds to the needs of the country.
There is a lot of transformation in the world in industry and economy and so many changes that are brought about by e-learning.
We want our system to be adaptive as we are moving from manual to digital learning. This means that our approach has to change a bit.
For example, sewing started with the use of needles to hand-held sewing machines but now it is automated.
So our system has to be automated to meet today’s needs so that our children are not left behind.
More: Chronicle