Understanding Nigeria's 2025/26 curriculum changes: what teachers need to know

Every few years, the curriculum shifts, and every time it does, teachers are left doing the real work of figuring out what it means for Monday morning. The 2025/26 academic year brought one of the more significant updates in recent memory, with changes to subject structure across basic education. Here is what matters for your weekly planning, without the jargon.

What changed

The headline change is a restructuring of subjects at the basic education level, aimed at reducing subject overload and sharpening focus on foundational literacy, numeracy, and skills-based learning. For primary school teachers, this generally means fewer standalone subjects and more integration of related topics under broader learning areas.

If you have taught through a previous curriculum revision, the pattern will feel familiar: some subjects merge, some get renamed, and the core content you have always taught, reading, number sense, basic scientific reasoning, stays largely intact underneath the new labels.

What stays the same

The fundamentals of what pupils need to know at each stage have not been thrown out. Foundational numeracy still builds the same way, from number recognition through place value to operations. Foundational literacy still moves from phonics through fluency to comprehension. Basic science still starts with observation and simple experimentation before moving into more structured concepts.

What has changed is packaging and pacing, not the underlying learning progression. This matters because it means your existing knowledge of how pupils learn a topic is not obsolete. You are adapting a structure, not relearning your subject.

What it means for weekly planning

Three practical points for anyone planning lessons week to week:

• Check your scheme of work against the current term structure. Subject names and week counts can shift even when content stays similar, so a scheme of work from two years ago may not map cleanly onto this year's term.
• Expect some reshuffling of topics between terms. A topic that used to sit in Second Term may now appear in First Term, or vice versa, as subjects get reorganised.
• Lean on resources built for the current structure, rather than adapting old material on your own time. This is exactly the gap TeacherHelp's Weekly Teaching Packs are built to close, each one aligned to the current term and week structure rather than a curriculum that has since moved on.

A note on accuracy

Curriculum policy details are published and updated by the Federal Ministry of Education and NERDC, and the specifics can vary by state and by school type. Always confirm the current scheme of work with your state ministry of education or your school's academic office before finalising a term's planning. TeacherHelp's Weekly Teaching Packs are reviewed against the published curriculum structure, but your school's own scheme of work is always the final word.

The bottom line

Curriculum changes are unsettling in the first term they land, mostly because of the extra work of re-mapping what you already know how to teach. The content itself rarely changes as much as the structure around it. Give yourself one term to get used to the new shape, and lean on ready-made, curriculum aligned resources to take the remapping work off your plate.