Updating primary school syllabuses- more than 5,000 suggestions on the EdEra (INFOGRAPHICS) open platform

A joint project between the Ministry of Education and Science and the EdEra open platform demonstrated how teachers, educationalists, experts and active members of the community can spend their time on reasoned public debate, sharing their experience and looking at best practice in how to teach children.

2,000 uniquely empowered commentators, over two weeks of public discussion, left 5,000 suggestions and 356 proposals for 15 teaching syllabuses for elementary schools on the Ed-Era.com public platform.

The greatest interest and discussion concerned syllabuses for the Ukrainian language and mathematics that registered 405 and 398 comments respectively.

"This is a unique number and an important intermediate result of the joint project between the Ministry and the EdEra open platform”, said Liliya Hrynevych, Minister of Education and Science. “This confirms just how much interest there is in the need for society to modernise the content of education in Ukrainian schools. More than 5,000 comments shows how much people are willing to invest their time, formulate proposals, give advice and share their experience as to how to successfully teach pupils and make sure they are interested. Not all proposals can be considered physically. But concerning the competency approach, adapting syllabuses to the age characteristics of children, updating syllabuses to remove secondary or outdated information will be included in the updated programmes, which will also be put up for public discussion", said Liliya Hrynevych.

Most of the proposals, according to the statistics, were from professional teachers working in both public and private schools, and training centres.

"Although discussions took place on separate pages for school subjects, there are many similarities in observations made by commentators”, said Alevtyna Lototska, Chief Specialist of the Department of Secondary and Preschool Education at the Ministry. “In particular, commentators have pointed to duplication of the same content in syllabuses on different subjects, the excessive requirements for assessment of knowledge, and the discrepancy between content and the age characteristics of pupils. Now the comments are being summarized by moderators from expert working groups, on the basis of comparative tables and the proposed revised syllabuses".

The updated syllabuses will be posted for public discussion on the EdEra platform from 29 June. After summarizing the comments that will be received from the second phase, syllabuses will be reiterated and submitted for approval by the Board of the Ministry.

During the third phase of the project, the EdEra platform will display teaching resources, videos and master classes, which should help teachers to teach better in accordance with the updated applications using the competency approach.