All are developed by the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NaCCA) under the Pre-Tertiary Education Act 2020 (Act 1049). A revised basic school curriculum was presented to the Ministry of Education in July 2026.
How the pieces fit
| Phase | Levels | Curriculum | Introduced |
|---|---|---|---|
| Key Phase 1 | KG1–B2 | Standards-Based Curriculum | September 2019 |
| Key Phase 2–3 | B3–B6 | ||
| Key Phase 4 | B7–B10 (JHS1–3 and SHS1) | Common Core Programme | Progressively from 2021/22 |
| Key Phase 5 | SHS1–3 | SHS, SHTS and STEM curricula | Rolled out from November 2024 |
The pioneer cohort taught under the Common Core Programme sat the BECE in July and August 2024. The senior high curriculum then arrived to meet them, which is why 2024 to 2026 has been an unusually demanding period for Ghanaian schools: two major curricula bedding in at once, in the same building, often with the same teachers.
What changed conceptually
The shift from an objective-based to a standards-based curriculum is not a relabelling. Under the previous model, a syllabus stated what a teacher should cover. Under the standards-based model, the curriculum states what a learner should be able to do, expressed through content standards, learning indicators and learning outcomes.
That distinction has a practical consequence most schools discover late. Coverage is no longer a defensible measure of progress. A teacher can honestly report that a topic was taught while the learning indicators beneath it remain unmet, and nothing in a scheme of work will reveal the difference.
The 4Rs and Core Competencies
Running through the curricula are the 4Rs — Reading, wRiting, aRithmetic and cReativity — and a set of Core Competencies including critical thinking and problem solving, creativity and innovation, communication and collaboration, cultural identity and global citizenship, personal development and leadership, and digital literacy.
These are the parts schools most often claim to be developing and least often evidence. They are difficult to assess with a written test, which means in practice they are frequently taught and never checked. See School-Based Assessment.
The 2026 revision
A revised basic school curriculum was presented to the Minister of Education in July 2026, following a review conducted between March and July 2026. NaCCA reported that the exercise engaged around 160 writers and reviewers across 12 subject areas, retained approximately 80 per cent of existing content, and was prompted by concerns about foundational literacy and numeracy, teacher feedback on curriculum overload and fragmentation, and external technical review.
Reported changes include introducing French from Basic 1 rather than Basic 4, and integrating science with agriculture to support inquiry-based learning. Full detail and an implementation timetable should be confirmed with NaCCA and the Ministry of Education. See the 2026 basic curriculum review.
What this means for how you hold your curriculum
Ghana has now revised its pre-tertiary curriculum substantially three times in seven years. Any school treating its curriculum as a set of departmental documents will rebuild by hand each time; a school holding it as structured data remaps once.
That is the practical argument for indicator-level mapping, and it matters more in Ghana than in most systems precisely because the reform cycle here has been fast.
How Edves maps it
| Mapping level | What coverage reporting can tell you |
|---|---|
| Subject | Almost nothing |
| Strand or sub-strand | That an area was addressed. Not which parts, or to what depth |
| Learning indicator | Exactly which expectation was taught, when, by whom, and whether anything assessed it |
Edves maps at learning indicator level. The practical output is a coverage report in three categories — taught and assessed, taught but never assessed, and not reached. The middle category is almost always the largest, and it is the one that explains the gap between a school’s internal confidence and its BECE or WASSCE results.
Mother tongue in early grades
Ghanaian language instruction in lower primary, with a planned transition to English, is curriculum policy and a persistent implementation challenge. See mother tongue education.
Verify with NaCCA
Curriculum documents, subject lists and implementation timetables are published by NaCCA and change. Confirm current versions with NaCCA directly rather than relying on any vendor’s summary, including this one.