80% reform, zero preparation: The Baccalaureate cohort dilemma

Salma Mostafa was never given a choice between the traditional Thanaweya Amma and the new Baccalaureate system. Her private school, which spans several educational stages in Giza’s Hadayek October district, announced early last year that it would no longer offer classes under the old Thanaweya Amma system; only the Baccalaureate.

Salma and her family gave in and enrolled her in the Baccalaureate track. One of her teachers, whose advice she trusted, had convinced her that the Baccalaureate was the way of the future, offering more options than the old system. Now she fears she made the wrong call after hearing that same teacher complain about the new Baccalaureate curriculum.

“At first I was convinced by the Baccalaureate. A new system with fewer subjects and a better chance to improve my grades,” Salma tells Al Manassa. “Now that I’ve seen the material on the ministry’s website, I feel like the subjects are difficult. Even though I take extra English lessons, I feel like this curriculum is above my level.”

Salma is one of 832,000 Egyptian students who enrolled in the Baccalaureate last academic year instead of the traditional Thanaweya Amma. But the outlook for that entire cohort has grown murky: many teachers admit they doubt their own readiness to teach curricula that only reached them 23 days before classes began, while teachers of English, chemistry and physics say the material doesn’t match the foundation students built up in earlier years.

The Baccalaureate is an optional alternative to the traditional Thanaweya Amma, introduced after parliament approved amendments to the education law. First-year students take six core subjects: Arabic, a second foreign language, Egyptian history, philosophy and logic, mathematics, and integrated science.

From the second year, students specialize in one of four tracks: medicine and life sciences, engineering and computer science, business administration, or arts and humanities. They can switch between them under certain conditions.

Second-year students share a common core of Arabic, history and a first foreign language, plus one specialized subject chosen within their track: mathematics or physics for medicine and life sciences; chemistry or programming for engineering and computer science; accounting or business administration for business; and psychology or a second foreign language for arts and humanities.

In the third year, students take religious education outside the overall grade total — pass/fail, with a minimum score of 70% — alongside track-specific subjects: biology and chemistry for medicine and life sciences, mathematics and physics for engineering and computer science, economics and mathematics for business, and geography and statistics for arts and humanities.

Ministry officials say 99% of students entering general secondary education chose the Baccalaureate over the traditional system, a shift that has drawn complaints from students and parents who say they were effectively forced into it last year.

A last-minute curriculum

The complaints don’t stop with students. Teachers are frustrated too. “There’s no way a teacher can take in an entire curriculum, understand it properly, and be ready to teach it to students in just 23 days,” says Mariam Hamdy, an English teacher.

“The ministry talks about a comprehensive overhaul of secondary education, but it forgot the most important part of the equation: the teacher,” she tells Al Manassa. “We heard the outside publishing houses and summary-book companies had the curriculum in hand well before we did.”

The Ministry of Education says it launched a “Baccalaureate Ambassadors” program to train teachers on the new material, reaching nearly 1,000 education officials who were meant to pass on what they’d learned to colleagues across regional directorates and administrations. Training was extended to classroom teachers on Aug. 15, less than a month before the school year began.

Mariam says the numbers trained so far don’t come close to covering the new curricula. Her own school, in the Tukh district of Qalyoubiya governorate, hasn’t seen any training yet. “Even the teachers who did attend complained it moved too fast, and they couldn’t properly go through the material they were supposedly trained on,” she says.

Education expert Dr. Mohamed Khalil Moussa calls this one of several challenges that have dogged the rollout. “Some teachers simply aren’t ready to teach the new curricula, and that’s one of the real obstacles facing the Baccalaureate system,” he tells Al Manassa.

Al Manassa reached out to Shady Zalata, the Ministry of Education's official spokesperson, but had received no response by time of publication.

It isn’t only the rushed timeline and thin training that worry Mariam, it’s the curriculum’s content, which she believes is beyond not just students but teachers too. “This curriculum suits graduates of language schools, who studied and trained in the language already. It’s completely different from what students learned before,” she says, before adding: “It’s also far too long. Two textbooks split across 10 concepts or units, not even counting the reader.”

Her account echoes what Hithem El-Sayed, another English teacher, posted on Facebook, explaining to his students why he’d apologized for how the Baccalaureate curriculum was being taught: “This curriculum breaks from the traditional format students are used to in Egyptian public-school English. The difference isn’t just about how hard the language is… it’s about how the material is applied and the kind of thinking it demands.”

Hithem writes that “the textbook leans on skills like explanation, analysis, comparison and evidence-based argument; skills that require students to think in English, even though their schooling up to now never gradually built toward them.”

Ahmed Farouk, a secondary-school chemistry teacher, agrees. “Teachers needed at least three months to get their heads around the new material,” he tells Al Manassa. Farouk teaches at a school in Cairo’s Roud El-Farag district, so he was lucky enough to get introductory training on the Baccalaureate and its new subjects. Even that wasn’t enough, he says: “The lecturer spent more time selling us on the Baccalaureate and the philosophy behind the new chemistry curriculum than actually walking us through its content.”

Education expert Mohamed Moussa agrees. “Some subjects, English and the sciences chief among them, branch out in so many directions that they need real time to train for and absorb,” he says.

Several education consultants had proposed spreading these curricula across both academic years, teaching them over the second and third years of secondary school, Moussa says. Instead, the current system is trying to cram all of that content into a single year, a challenge he says that calls for far more preparation and organization than it’s gotten.

Still, the consultant is careful to note the reform is a step in the right direction: it pushes analytical and critical-thinking skills and builds more organized, logical reasoning in students. It also lets students sit exams more than once — up to four times — giving them more room to improve their scores and taking some of the pressure off a single make-or-break test.

A fix for one crisis

Letting students retake exams was the ministry’s answer to a harder problem: subject matter, especially in the sciences, that students simply weren’t ready for. In the first year, Baccalaureate students take an integrated science course much like preparatory-stage science — chemistry, physics, geology and biology folded into one. From the second year on, they move into specialized subjects by track, chemistry and physics among the options.

Letting students retake exams was the ministry’s answer to the problem of difficult subject matter, especially in the sciences, that students simply weren’t ready for. In the first year, Baccalaureate students take an integrated science course much like preparatory-stage science — chemistry, physics, geology and biology folded into one. From the second year on, they move into specialized subjects by track, chemistry and physics among the options.

“The curriculum is huge and heavy, and the student isn’t equipped for it,” Farouk says of his frustration with it. “You study integrated science, which barely scratches the surface, and then suddenly you’re face to face with something as dense as chemistry.”

He traces the problem back to the ministry trying to paper over a teacher shortage: instructors from every scientific specialty — geology and environmental science included — now teach integrated science, freeing up chemistry, biology and physics teachers for the two specialization years.

Ibrahim El-Husseini, who teaches both integrated science and chemistry, sees it differently. “Yes, it’s heavy, but students absorb material at different paces. And the number of subjects a student takes now is far lower than under the old Thanaweya Amma, so the length is justified. The student has fewer subjects to focus on,” he tells Al Manassa.

Financial and pedagogical concerns

The worry has reached parliament. MP Samir El-Bayoumi put a parliamentary question to the prime minister and the education minister over what he called the confusion surrounding the Egyptian Baccalaureate’s rollout, and the anxiety it has caused students and parents. He pressed the ministry on how ready it actually was to implement the new system.

He also flagged the financial burden the system could place on families especially that some education platforms have already started advertising private lessons in new Baccalaureate subjects, including programming and artificial intelligence, which could drive up the cost of schooling further.

Kamal Mougheeth, a researcher at the National Center for Educational Research and Development, argues that rolling out the Egyptian Baccalaureate this fast, without a real transition period, is a pedagogical problem in itself, especially given how far the new curricula’s philosophy and teaching methods diverge from what students were used to.

“You can’t shift overnight from a system built on memorization and rote learning to one built on analysis and critical thinking,” Mougheeth tells Al Manassa. “It takes gradual preparation, for students and teachers alike.”

He also criticizes what he calls a pattern of major education decisions made without enough preparation or public debate, pointing to the tablet program in secondary schools. “The state spent tens of billions of pounds on it before the whole thing came to nothing,” he recalls.

“Good education needs a teacher who’s fully dedicated, satisfied in the job, and paid a decent wage,” Mougheeth adds. “But we’re dealing with much bigger problems: weak spending on education, overcrowded classrooms, and teachers who haven’t been properly prepared for the new curricula.”

Mohamed Moussa believes the first cohort to go through the system will naturally hit some rough patches, simply by virtue of being first. But he tries to reassure students and parents that the Ministry of Education has promised exam questions will stick closely to the curricula, and that the transition will unfold gradually and in an organized way to ease things for students.

That reassurance hasn’t reached Salma, or the more than 800,000 students like her, trying to make sense of a ministry chasing reform with little regard for whether its students or schools are actually ready for it, amid growing fear that this first Baccalaureate cohort could end up as little more than lab rats.