Our curriculum uses the government curriculum as a basic framework. This offers a fairly comprehensive idea of what competencies children should cover at different ages. It is generally quite good and gives us a guide as what to cover with the kids to make sure they have the academic skills expected of them.

Some limitations of the government curriculum include

• It focuses purely on academic attainment, rather than something more holistic
• It does not include practical skills, which we feel have methodological value, but also innate value for kids in developing regions, where major parts of the economy are based around agriculture & skilled- & unskilled-labour.
• It’s emphasis on subject-based and fragmented educational competencies encourages teaching to be conducted in quite a modular way which doesn’t help kids to understand how the things they are learning relate to the non-modular world around them.

For now we’ve simply recognised these short-comings and tried to work around them. Ideally, however we need to create our own curriculum, incorporating and supplementing what the government has provided with our own ideas. Unfortunately we haven’t quite done this yet, leaving our teachers without clear guidance of what we want them to be covering with the children. This becomes particularly important as the children get older, when the short-comings of sticking with the government curriculum alone will become more apparent.