Report of the Review Committee Established to Formulate a Vision for the Transformation of the Secondary and Higher Secondary Education System (with an Integrated Whole-of-Schooling Perspective)

Volume I

Vision for Learning Transformation

Setting Direction, Priorities, and Governing Commitments

Report of the Review Committee Established to Formulate a Vision for the Transformation of the Secondary and Higher Secondary Education System (with an Integrated Whole-of-Schooling Perspective)

Volume I

Vision for Learning Transformation

Setting Direction, Priorities, and Governing Commitments

Report of the Review Committee Established to Formulate a Vision for the Transformation of the Secondary and Higher Secondary Education System (with an Integrated Whole-of-Schooling Perspective)

Volume I

Vision for Learning Transformation

Setting Direction, Priorities, and Governing Commitments

Published by

Secondary and Higher Education Division Ministry of Education

Government of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh

February 2026

© 2026 Secondary and Higher Education Division, Ministry of Education

Government of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh

All rights reserved. No part of this report may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise— without prior permission, except for purposes of education, research, evaluation, or policy consultation with appropriate acknowledgement.

Review Committee established to formulate a Vision for the Transformation of the Secondary and Higher Secondary Education System

Dr Abed Chaudhury Chair of the Committee, Distinguished Gene Scientist
Professor Mushtaque Khan Member of Committee, Department of Economics, SOAS, University of London, United Kingdom
Professor Shah Shamim Member of Committee, Institute of Education and Research (IER) University of Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Mr. Saidur Rahman, Member of Committee, Joint Secretary, Secondary-I Wing SHED, Ministry of Education, Dhaka, Bangladesh
Professor Erum Mariam Member of Committee, Executive Director, BRAC Institute of Educational Development, Brac University, Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Dr Ananta Neelim Member of Committee, Senior Lecturer in Economics, University of Tasmania, Australia
Mr Shahir Chowdhury Member of Committee, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Shikho, Dhaka, Bangladesh
Ms. Sabina Yeasmin, Member of Committee, Deputy Secretary (Government Secondary-II Wing) SHED, Ministry of Education, Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Mr Tarfadar Md Akhtar Jamil Member Secretary, Joint Secretary (Government Secondary Branch), SHED, Ministry of Education, Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Note to the Reader

This report has been prepared by a Review Committee constituted by the Secondary and Higher Education Division, Ministry of Education, Government of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh, under a formal mandate to articulate a future-oriented vision for the transformation of the secondary and higher secondary education system.

The report is issued in two complementary volumes.

Volume I sets out the vision, guiding principles, and system-level direction for reform. It provides a diagnosis of the key challenges facing the education system and articulates a coherent framework to guide future policy, institutional reform, and investment decisions. While the Committee’s formal mandate focuses on secondary and higher secondary education, the analysis in this volume adopts an integrated whole-of-schooling perspective, recognising that learning outcomes at the secondary level are shaped by conditions, incentives, and transitions across the full schooling cycle.

Volume II, titled the National Learning Implementation Framework (NLIF), translates the vision articulated in Volume I into a practical governance and implementation framework. It sets out mechanisms for sequencing reform, ensuring accountability, managing system incentives, and supporting sustained improvement over time.

The two volumes are designed to be read together, but each may also be read independently, depending on the reader’s role and interest. Volume I is intended primarily for policymakers, senior officials, and stakeholders concerned with strategic direction and reform priorities.

Volume II is intended for officials and institutions responsible for policy design, delivery, monitoring, and implementation.

The Committee acknowledges that education reform is complex and context-dependent. The recommendations presented in this report are therefore framed as guiding principles and system-level design choices, rather than prescriptive operational instructions. Decisions regarding adoption, adaptation, and implementation rest with the appropriate authorities of the Government of Bangladesh

Executive Summary

The problem we face

Bangladesh has expanded schooling at scale. More children are enrolled. More classrooms have been built. More students pass public exams. These numbers were often used to show success. But learning did not keep pace.

Too many students move through school without learning to read fluently, without building basic maths skills, and without learning how to think, explain, or apply ideas. They pass grades and receive certificates, but many do not gain real knowledge or confidence. Certificates have grown. Learning has not.

This gap has been visible for years. Independent studies and household surveys repeatedly show weak learning, especially in mathematics and in tasks that require understanding rather than memorisation. These findings were known. Yet they did not change how success was judged. The system continued to focus on enrolment, infrastructure, exam participation, and pass rates. Learning remained secondary.

As long as these visible numbers improved, weak learning did not force action. Students were promoted. Certificates were issued. Examination results were kept stable through design and moderation. Over time, the gap between schooling and learning stopped being a warning sign. It became normal. The consequences are now urgent.

Bangladesh is nearing the end of its demographic dividend. The students currently in school will soon form the core of the workforce. If present conditions continue, many will enter adult life with certificates but without the skills needed for productive work, for adapting to change, or for continued learning. The cost will be felt in lower productivity, slower growth, and weak returns on decades of public investment in education.

There is also a deep social cost. When the system promotes students without ensuring learning, it gives families a false sense of security. Risk shifts from the state to households. Families who can afford it turn to coaching and private tutoring. Families who cannot are left behind. Inequality widens. Trust in public education weakens. Young people spend years in school, but too many leave without what they were promised.

In short: the system expanded, but it did not deliver learning.

Why weak learning became normal

Weak learning persisted because of how the education system is organised, governed, and judged. Across the system, success is measured through what is visible and easy to count. Enrolment numbers, buildings, exam participation, and pass rates are tracked closely. Institutions and officials are judged on these results. Learning quality is harder to measure, unevenly assessed, and rarely enforced. This imbalance shaped behaviour throughout the system.

The curriculum became crowded and unrealistic. Finishing the syllabus mattered more than ensuring understanding. Teachers were under pressure to cover content and prepare students for exams, even when many students were not ready. Teaching shifted toward memorisation, copying, and exam practice. These were predictable responses to the signals teachers received.

Assessment made the problem worse. Examinations carried high stakes, but their credibility was weak. When results did not align with expectations, they were adjusted through design choices, moderation, and interpretation. This reduced the risk of visible failure, but it weakened the meaning of exam results. Students could progress even when learning had not occurred.

Governance reinforced these patterns. Administrative systems focused on compliance, reporting, and procedural completion. Officials were rewarded for meeting targets and maintaining stability, not for confronting learning failure that could not be quickly resolved.

Families responded in rational ways. As trust in classroom learning and exam signals declined, households invested more in private tutoring to protect their children’s prospects. This shifted responsibility for learning from the system to families and widened inequality.

Together, these forces produced a stable outcome. Weak learning did not trigger correction because the system was not organised to treat it as unacceptable. Instead, it was absorbed and normalised. Students progressed. Certificates were issued. Success continued to be reported.

Over time, the system learned how to function with weak learning.

What must change: five decisive shifts

The lesson of the past two decades is straightforward. Reform did not change outcomes because it did not change how the system works. As long as progression, certification, and visible results are rewarded more consistently than learning, weak learning will continue. Adding new programmes, training, or technology without changing these signals will reproduce the same results.

The problem is not how much reform has been attempted. It is the direction reform has taken. Five shifts are required.

• Learning integrity must be the organising priority

Learning must have real consequences. Students should not move ahead unless they have learned what is essential. Progression must be based on mastery, not on age, coverage, or administrative discretion. When learning has not occurred, the system must slow down, adjust expectations, and correct course. Advancing students on paper cannot substitute for learning.

• Curriculum must be reduced and disciplined

Removing overload must count as reform. A curriculum that cannot be taught cannot be learned. The system needs fewer objectives, clear sequencing, and strong focus on foundational skills, especially in the early grades. Too much content and too many symbolic activities reduce time for teaching. Making space for learning is not a loss. It is a necessary reform.

• Assessment must regain credibility

Messages from the system must point in the same direction. Exams shape behaviour. When assessment signals are weak or unstable, defensive behaviour dominates. Curriculum, exams, supervision, and pathways must all reward the same thing: real learning. Alignment and trust must be rebuilt before stakes are raised.

• Teachers must be given conditions that make learning possible

Information must reach classrooms in time to help. Protect classroom time. Clarify priorities. Reduce unnecessary administrative tasks. Teachers need quick, simple feedback about what students understand so they can adjust lessons while it still matters. Mentoring and practical support must be linked to actual teaching, not paperwork.

• Governance must shift from procedural compliance to learning accountability Responsibility must shift from families back to the system. Weak learning must trigger response, not accommodation. Authority and escalation pathways must be clear. Institutions must feel responsibility for learning, not only for reporting. When outcomes are poor, the response should come from the system through support and enforcement, not from households paying privately.

These five shifts mark the point where change becomes possible. They work because they change what the system allows and what it enforces, not because they rely on goodwill or motivation alone.

The North Star: what success should look like in lived experience

Success in this Vision is defined through what children and families see and feel in everyday life.

Early childhood and the first years of primary: Children arrive ready to participate. Classrooms are calm, predictable, and rich in language. The focus is on reading, writing, and basic number skills. These foundations are learned well, not rushed. Progress is checked often and simply. Confidence builds early.

Primary school: Learning grows through regular feedback, not rare high-stakes tests. Teachers know what students understand and adjust lessons as needed. Classroom time is protected for teaching. Parents receive clear messages about what their children are learning and how they can help.

Upper primary and lower secondary: Classrooms encourage explanation and reasoning. Students talk through their ideas, compare answers, and improve their thinking. Assessment helps learning rather than distorting it. Teachers can slow down when students need more time. Students feel safe to ask questions and make mistakes.

Secondary school: Assessment results are clear and trusted. Students understand where they stand and what effort leads to progress. Guidance is direct. Academic, technical, and vocational pathways are treated with equal seriousness. Choices are explained, not left unclear.

Families and communities: Families receive regular, simple information about learning. Private tutoring becomes optional rather than necessary. Trust grows when schools communicate clearly and when progress is visible. Learning becomes the central purpose of schooling.

This is the North Star. It keeps the system focused on lived experience, not only on institutional plans.

Why the next five years matter

The system will not fix itself. Weak learning has remained stable even as schooling expanded, money increased, and reforms were added. Without changes to incentives and enforcement, more activity will not lead to better learning.

The next five years are a narrow window. During this time, rules, routines, and expectations can still be reset before weak learning becomes firmly embedded in the workforce and the economy. Delay reduces options.

This Vision establishes the governing framework for reform. It defines what must be protected and what must change. Implementation sequencing and delivery will be guided by the National Learning Implementation Framework (NLIF). The purpose of the NLIF is to operationalise this Vision over time, not to reinterpret its core commitments.

Every reform proposal should be judged by one simple question:

Does it strengthen real learning and everyday correction, or does it add activity without changing behaviour?

If it strengthens learning, it belongs. If it adds activity without changing behaviour, it should be rejected, even if it looks attractive or has external support.

What is at stake is not another reform cycle. It is whether Bangladesh’s education system can become a system that learns, one that faces evidence honestly, corrects course when needed, and keeps learning at the centre.

Closing note

Bangladesh has achieved much by bringing children into school. The next phase is harder and more important. It is about what happens inside classrooms and inside the institutions that guide them.

The country now needs a system that values mastery, protects time for teaching, measures learning honestly, supports teachers to improve, and acts when learning is weak.

This path does not require many new programmes. It requires discipline.

1. Protect the foundations.
2. Align curriculum and exams.
3. Make assessment credible.
4. Support teachers.
5. Enforce standards fairly.

1. Return feedback to classrooms.
2. Remove what gets in the way of learning.

If these steps are taken over the next five years, Bangladesh can move from schooling at scale to learning at scale. That is the promise families have been waiting for. That is the promise

this Vision aims to keep.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Purpose and frame

Bangladesh’s education system is failing its children. For decades, schooling expanded while learning stagnated. Classrooms multiplied, enrolment figures climbed, and certificates were issued in ever greater numbers. These visible signs of progress were repeatedly used to claim success. Yet beneath them, a more damaging reality took hold. Millions of children spent years in school without learning to read fluently, reason clearly, or develop the confidence needed to navigate adult life. This is not a marginal problem at the edges of the system. It is the defining failure at its core.

This Vision begins from a position of moral urgency. A society that allows children to pass through its education system without learning is not merely inefficient. It is unjust. It wastes human potential, deepens inequality, and transfers the cost of failure onto families who did everything they were asked to do. Schooling was delivered. Learning was not.

• Why this Vision exists

Bangladesh now sits near the bottom of global learning outcomes among countries that have achieved near-universal schooling. This is not because teachers did not work hard, parents did not care, or children lacked ability. It is because learning was never treated as the central test of success.

For many years, the system prioritised expansion, compliance, and visible outputs. Enrolment, infrastructure, and headline examination results mattered. Learning outcomes, especially for children who struggled early or fell behind quietly, mattered far less. Evidence of weak mastery accumulated across assessments, surveys, and classroom observations. It was documented, discussed, and acknowledged. Yet it rarely altered what the system enforced or what it ignored.

The pandemic did not create this crisis. It exposed it. When schools closed, many children lacked the foundations needed to recover without major adjustment. When schools reopened, curricula resumed largely unchanged. The system moved forward. The children who had fallen behind did not.

Bangladesh has now reached a point where denial is no longer possible. The demographic dividend is narrowing. The labour market is unforgiving. Social trust is fragile. Continuing to produce cohorts of young people without strong literacy, numeracy, and reasoning skills is no longer just an education problem. It is a national risk. This Vision exists because there is no second chance at this.

The changes required cannot be achieved within a single plan period or political term. This Vision therefore takes a generational view of reform, recognising that learning foundations established today shape outcomes over the next ten to fifteen years. It defines what must hold steady over that period, while implementation pace and sequencing are governed through the NLIF.

• What this Vision covers and why it matters

This Vision focuses on learning from pre-primary through the end of secondary education. These years determine whether a child acquires the foundations that make everything else possible. When these foundations are weak, no later reform can fully compensate.

The Vision covers general education, madrasa education, English-medium schooling, and technical and vocational pathways. It does so not to treat them as equivalent by assumption, but to confront the reality that different streams now offer very different learning conditions and very different futures.

Higher education and adult learning matter deeply. But without strong foundations, they become sorting mechanisms rather than engines of opportunity. This Vision addresses the part of the system where failure is most damaging and where reform still has the power to change life trajectories.

• What this Vision means by learning

Throughout this report, learning is not treated as the accumulation of content, the reproduction of information, or the successful navigation of examinations. Learning is understood as the gradual development of capability, judgement, and agency that allows a child to participate meaningfully in society.

At its core, learning means being able to read with understanding, reason with numbers, communicate ideas, listen to others, ask questions, and apply knowledge to unfamiliar

situations. It includes the ability to think, explain, reflect, and revise one’s understanding over time. These capacities are not abstract ideals. They are the foundations of personal dignity, economic participation, and civic life.

This Vision is grounded in a humanistic understanding of education. Children are not instruments for economic growth, nor are they vessels for rote transmission. Education serves society best when it enables individuals to develop confidence, curiosity, self-respect, and the ability to engage with difference, complexity, and change.

Culture, language, and belief shape how learning is expressed and valued. This Vision respects that diversity, but it does not prescribe moral doctrine or cultural hierarchy. Its concern is whether the education system equips young people with the intellectual and practical capacities needed to navigate adult life with agency and responsibility.

Learning, as used in this report, therefore refers to what learners can actually do with what they know. Where schooling advances without developing these capabilities, learning has not occurred, regardless of enrolment, coverage, or certification.

• The governing failure this Vision confronts

This Vision does not assume that the system is doing its best and merely needs refinement. It begins from a harder truth. Systems behave exactly as they are set up to behave.

In Bangladesh, the education system rewarded compliance over competence, reporting over results, and credential expansion over learning integrity. Teachers were monitored but rarely supported. Schools were inspected but seldom empowered. Officials were assessed on completing processes rather than improving outcomes. Parents were told to trust the system, even as they paid privately to protect their children from its weaknesses.

In such conditions, behaviour adapted predictably. When effort was disconnected from results, motivation drained away. When weak performance carried no consequence, it spread. When appearances mattered more than substance, reporting replaced problem-solving and certificates replaced capability.

This Vision therefore does not begin with programmes or pilots. It begins with how the system actually works. It asks what people respond to, what they avoid, and what they learn to prioritise in their daily decisions. It treats reform as a question of behaviour and consequence, not aspiration.

• A break from comfortable narratives

For too long, education reform in Bangladesh was framed to preserve comfort rather than confront failure.

This Vision makes a different choice. It states plainly that the system failed to deliver learning at scale, and that this failure persisted because it was tolerated. This is not about naming villains. It is about naming governing logics. A system that consistently produces weak learning outcomes is not unlucky. It is operating as it has been allowed to operate. Facing this reality is not pessimism. It is the starting point for serious change.

• What this Vision demands instead

This Vision focuses on changing the everyday signals the system sends.1 It asks whether teachers are supported to succeed rather than merely supervised. Whether students experience early success or repeated failure. Whether information about learning reaches classrooms in time to matter. Whether schools and local officials are trusted to solve problems or simply expected to report them. Whether curriculum, assessment, and pathways reinforce the same priorities or pull in different directions.

Change does not come from exhortation. It comes when effort is recognised, support is real, feedback leads to adjustment, and failure is neither hidden nor ignored.

1 In this document, system signals refer to the rules, routines, and incentives through which the education system communicates what matters in practice. They are not directives or policy statements. Signals shape behaviour by default — through curriculum scope, assessment formats, instructional time, progression rules, reporting requirements, and the distribution of discretion and support — even in the absence of instruction or directives.

Education systems improve only when they are required to confront evidence, correct course, and respond early to signs of failure. In Bangladesh, information has been collected at scale for years, but it has rarely triggered action. Data travelled upward. Learning did not travel back.

This Vision insists that information must lead somewhere. When learning is weak, something must change. When support fails, it must be strengthened. When rules are ignored, that must matter. Not through arbitrary punishment, but through clear expectations, visible follow- through, and consequences that are predictable rather than selective.

Finally, this Vision treats learning failure as a public responsibility, not a private burden. When parents must pay to secure basic learning, the system has already failed. The task ahead is not to demand more effort from teachers or more patience from families. It is to rebuild a system where effort has meaning, support arrives before failure hardens, information is used rather than filed away, and learning is no longer optional. That is the standard this Vision sets.

• How to read this document

This Vision is structured to move from evidence, to system diagnosis, to design principles, and finally to political and institutional commitments. Each part plays a distinct role.

The Executive Summary sets out the problem, the governing diagnosis, the five decisive shifts required, and the lived experience the system must deliver. For many readers, this will be sufficient. It is designed to stand alone.

Chapter 2 documents the state of learning in Bangladesh. It draws on national assessments, household surveys, administrative data, and system reviews to show how weak learning has persisted despite expansion. The full evidentiary record supporting this chapter is provided in Appendix A.

Chapter 3 explains why learning has not improved. It shifts from description to system analysis, setting out the low-learning equilibrium, the dominance of non-learning signals, and why well- intentioned initiatives fail when system incentives remain unchanged. Appendix B should be read alongside this chapter. It provides the analytical framework for understanding how learning dynamics, system domains, and feedback loops interact, and why sequencing and leverage matter.

Chapter 4 reframes success from the perspective of children and families. It describes what the learning journey should look like if the system were functioning as intended, and why coherence across stages matters.

Chapters 5 and 6 translate this learning journey into system design. Chapter 5 addresses curriculum, assessment, and progression as system signals. Chapter 6 sets out what professional accountability and support for teachers must look like under conditions of clarity and coherence.

Chapter 7 examines the enabling systems and political realities that determine whether coherence can be sustained once enforcement begins, including governance, incentives, finance, information, and public narrative.

Chapter 8 establishes the implementation logic and the non-negotiables that protect the reform from dilution, layering, or retreat. It defines what phasing is allowed to mean and what cannot be reopened.

Chapter 9 addresses the conditions that surround learning, including health, equity, technology, and pathways. These are treated not as parallel agendas, but as system conditions whose role is to stabilise learning effort and protect coherence.

Chapter 10 sets out how the system learns and adapts without losing authority or credibility. It defines how experimentation, evidence, and course correction can occur within fixed commitments.

Chapter 11 concludes by articulating the national compact required for this Vision to hold. It specifies what the system is asking of teachers, families, and institutions, what the state commits in return, and where the line will not be crossed.

This Vision establishes the governing framework for education reform. It defines direction, priorities, and non-negotiable commitments. It does not prescribe programmes, delivery mechanisms, or implementation choices. Those decisions belong to the NLIF, which is designed to translate this governing logic into sequenced action over time without altering, diluting, or reopening the commitments set out here.

Chapter 2. The state of learning in Bangladesh

This chapterestablishes that Bangladesh expanded schooling and credentials at scale without achieving corresponding gains in learning.shows that learning failure begins early, compounds over time, and is rarely corrected once students fall behind.demonstrates how assessment practices enabled credential expansion while eroding the credibility of learning signals.documents how fragmented governance, weak enforcement, and misaligned incentives normalised low learning outcomes.shows how underinvestment and inefficient spending shifted the cost of learning failure onto households through private tutoring.demonstrates how inequality is reproduced through poverty, gender, disability, language, and stratified education streams.concludes that weak learning is not accidental or temporary, but the predictable result of system choices that prioritised expansion and appearance over learning integrity.This chapterestablishes that Bangladesh expanded schooling and credentials at scale without achieving corresponding gains in learning.shows that learning failure begins early, compounds over time, and is rarely corrected once students fall behind.demonstrates how assessment practices enabled credential expansion while eroding the credibility of learning signals.documents how fragmented governance, weak enforcement, and misaligned incentives normalised low learning outcomes.shows how underinvestment and inefficient spending shifted the cost of learning failure onto households through private tutoring.demonstrates how inequality is reproduced through poverty, gender, disability, language, and stratified education streams.concludes that weak learning is not accidental or temporary, but the predictable result of system choices that prioritised expansion and appearance over learning integrity. This chapterestablishes that Bangladesh expanded schooling and credentials at scale without achieving corresponding gains in learning.shows that learning failure begins early, compounds over time, and is rarely corrected once students fall behind.demonstrates how assessment practices enabled credential expansion while eroding the credibility of learning signals.documents how fragmented governance, weak enforcement, and misaligned incentives normalised low learning outcomes.shows how underinvestment and inefficient spending shifted the cost of learning failure onto households through private tutoring.demonstrates how inequality is reproduced through poverty, gender, disability, language, and stratified education streams.concludes that weak learning is not accidental or temporary, but the predictable result of system choices that prioritised expansion and appearance over learning integrity.This chapterestablishes that Bangladesh expanded schooling and credentials at scale without achieving corresponding gains in learning.shows that learning failure begins early, compounds over time, and is rarely corrected once students fall behind.demonstrates how assessment practices enabled credential expansion while eroding the credibility of learning signals.documents how fragmented governance, weak enforcement, and misaligned incentives normalised low learning outcomes.shows how underinvestment and inefficient spending shifted the cost of learning failure onto households through private tutoring.demonstrates how inequality is reproduced through poverty, gender, disability, language, and stratified education streams.concludes that weak learning is not accidental or temporary, but the predictable result of system choices that prioritised expansion and appearance over learning integrity.

For more than two decades, Bangladesh expanded schooling at extraordinary scale. New classrooms were built across the country, enrolment rose steadily, and national programmes reached communities that had long been excluded from formal education. These achievements were highly visible and frequently cited as evidence that the system was on the right path. But for millions of children, schooling did not result in learning.

This chapter makes a difficult claim, grounded in evidence and long visible to those working inside the system. Bangladesh did not merely struggle to improve learning outcomes. Over time, the education system did not merely fail to improve learning outcomes. It actively produced and defended an equilibrium in which weak learning could persist alongside expanding credentials and visible success. This equilibrium was sustained through policy choices, incentive structures, and enforcement practices that prioritised control, progression, and political signalling over the integrity of learning.

Appendix A documents the full diagnostic record behind this chapter, including quantitative evidence from national assessments, household surveys, and administrative systems spanning multiple years. This chapter does not rehearse that evidence in detail. It draws out what it means. Each section presented in this chapter has an accompanying section in the appendix.

• Learning foundations, classroom practice, and progression

Learning failure in Bangladesh begins early and compounds over time. Around 80 percent of children enter Grade 1 without consistent exposure to structured early learning, language-rich interaction, or age-appropriate cognitive development. Early childhood provision exists, but coverage and quality remain uneven relative to the size of the cohort. These risks have been identified repeatedly in studies, feasibility assessments, and national reviews. They were known, acknowledged, and left unresolved at scale.

Primary schools therefore inherit classrooms marked by wide variation in readiness. Yet the system does not adapt to this reality. Repeated national assessments show that by the end of primary school, fewer than half of students demonstrate grade-level proficiency in Bangla, and only around one-third do so in mathematics. These outcomes have remained largely unchanged across successive assessment cycles, pointing to a structural failure rather than a temporary disruption.

Instead of closing learning gaps, the system carries them forward. As students move into lower secondary education, curriculum demands increase sharply in abstraction and pace. Students are expected to reason, apply concepts, and work independently without having mastered the foundational skills required to do so. Many cannot cope. By the end of secondary school, more than 30 per cent of students have dropped out, with the steepest losses occurring between Grades 8 and 10.

Classroom practice reinforces these patterns. Teaching is dominated by copying, recall, and pressure to complete the syllabus. Opportunities for explanation, feedback, and problem- solving are limited. Effective instructional time is far lower than policy frameworks assume, eroded by teacher absence, administrative demands, large class sizes, and multi-grade teaching. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, curricula were largely reinstated without systematic reprioritisation, despite clear evidence of learning loss.

Students therefore progress through grades without learning. Once they fall behind, the system offers little chance of recovery.

• Assessment, credentials, and learning signals

Assessment is the organising force of Bangladesh’s education system. It determines progression, status, and access to opportunity. It shapes how teachers teach, how students study, and how families make decisions about time and money. Yet assessment signals no longer reliably represent learning.

Independent assessments show modest levels of mastery, particularly in mathematics. At the same time, public examination outcomes expanded rapidly over many years. Over the past two decades, pass rates in public examinations more than doubled, while independently measured learning levels remained low. This divergence hollowed out the meaning of credentials and weakened their value as indicators of competence.

When marking stringency or enforcement practices changed, examination results shifted dramatically within a single year. Such volatility cannot plausibly reflect changes in teaching quality or student ability. Attempts to alter assessment and curriculum regimes have not failed because they were absent, but because they were contested. Reforms that reduced high-stakes examinations or shifted toward competency-based approaches disrupted established interests, including political narratives, coaching markets, and familiar parental expectations. These reforms triggered backlash through media, partisan mobilisation, and claims of declining standards, leading to partial reversal or reversion. In this sense, assessment dominance was not accidental.

Concerns about examination integrity further weakened trust. Question leakage, automatic pass provisions, and organised malpractice were repeatedly acknowledged in official documents

and policy discussions. These were known vulnerabilities in a high-stakes system that prioritised outcomes over credibility.

Families responded rationally to this uncertainty. When grades could no longer be trusted as signals of learning, households treated examinations as high-risk contests. Private tutoring and coaching expanded rapidly, functioning as a parallel system for managing risk. Coaching focused narrowly on anticipated questions, formats, and marking schemes, reinforcing memorisation and narrowing learning. Assessment ceased to reward mastery. It rewarded access, risk management, and endurance.

• Governance failures, incentives, and resource leakages

The failure to convert schooling into learning is inseparable from governance. Authority is fragmented across ministries, directorates, and boards with overlapping but incomplete mandates. Curriculum, assessment, teacher management, supervision, and financing operate through parallel institutional chains that rarely converge on classroom learning. This fragmentation diffuses responsibility and weakens coherence.

Accountability flows upward through reports and checklists rather than outward to communities or peers. District and upazila levels function primarily as administrative conduits rather than empowered problem-solving tiers. Supervision focuses on compliance rather than instructional improvement. Information is generated at scale, but consequences rarely follow.

Enforcement is selective and uneven. Rules exist and can be applied stringently when outcomes are politically salient, but are relaxed or inconsistently enforced when learning integrity conflicts with progression targets, institutional convenience, or vested interests. Promotion and career progression are largely disconnected from instructional quality or student learning. In such an environment, reduced effort and informal practices become rational responses rather than aberrations.

Empirical studies document enrolment inflation, diversion of school funds, and weak verification at school level. These are not isolated deviations. They are stable features of a system where discretion is high and accountability is low.

Political incentives reinforced this equilibrium. Visible outputs such as enrolment expansion, infrastructure delivery, and headline examination results were rewarded. Learning outcomes were not. This reflected repeated choices about what would be measured, what would be enforced, and what would be allowed to persist.

• Education financing, expenditure efficiency, and cost shifting

Chronic underinvestment and inefficient use of resources further constrain learning in ways that are both structural and consequential. Public spending on education has remained low for decades relative to national ambition, demographic pressure, and the demands placed on schools. Where spending does occur, it is heavily absorbed by salaries and routine administrative costs, leaving limited fiscal space for remediation, instructional support, teacher coaching, or school-level problem-solving.

This is not simply a question of how much is spent, but how spending behaves. Weak verification, fragmented accountability, and limited linkage between finance and learning

outcomes mean that additional resources do not reliably translate into improved instruction. Funds flow, but their impact dissipates before reaching classrooms in ways that matter for struggling students, while simultaneously sustaining administrative routines, informal extraction, and private markets that benefit from weak public delivery.

When public provision fails to deliver learning, households absorb the cost. Household surveys show that private tutoring is now the single largest component of education spending for many families. For many households, this is no longer a discretionary supplement. It is the price of survival in an assessment system whose signals cannot be trusted. Parents pay not to get ahead, but to avoid falling behind.

This cost shifting is deeply inequitable. Families with resources can buy protection against weak instruction and volatile examinations. Families without resources bear the full consequences of system failure. Over time, public education shifts from a leveller of opportunity to a sorting mechanism that mirrors household wealth.

• Equity and inclusion

The system does not fail evenly. Poverty shapes attendance stability, learning outcomes, and progression at every stage of schooling. Children from low-income households are more likely to attend irregularly, fall behind early, and drop out when academic demands increase. Geographic disadvantage compounds these risks, particularly in rural areas, char regions, and urban informal settlements.

Girls experience sharp dropout during adolescence, despite decades of policy attention. Early marriage, safety concerns, household responsibilities, and social expectations converge at the point where academic pressure intensifies and household costs rise. Stipends have supported enrolment, but they have not offset weak learning, examination risk, or the absence of credible pathways beyond schooling.

Children with disabilities remain structurally excluded. Inaccessible infrastructure, limited specialist support, and inadequate teacher preparation prevent meaningful inclusion. Linguistic minority children face a different barrier. They are expected to master complex concepts in languages they do not speak at home, undermining comprehension, confidence, and participation from the earliest grades.

These disadvantages accumulate. Early gaps become entrenched exclusions. By the time students leave the system, outcomes reflect unequal exposure to learning conditions over time rather than effort or potential.

• Education streams and stratification

Bangladesh’s parallel education streams operate not as equivalent routes, but as stratified

pathways with unequal learning conditions and unequal futures.

Differences in curriculum balance, teacher quality, assessment regimes, and access to supplementary learning translate into sharply different preparation for higher education and employment. English-medium pathways concentrate advantage through smaller classes, greater resources, and stronger alignment with competitive examinations. General and madrasa streams operate under tighter constraints, particularly in rural and disadvantaged areas.

Technical and vocational education remains weakly connected to upward mobility and is often perceived as a terminal pathway.

Mobility between streams is limited in practice. Early placement matters, and later transitions are constrained by curricular mismatches, assessment barriers, and institutional gatekeeping. Private tutoring amplifies these divides, allowing some students to compensate for weak provision while others cannot.

The result is a system that reproduces inequality while claiming neutrality. Credentials appear formally equivalent, but their social and economic value diverges sharply. Opportunity is shaped less by aspiration or ability than by pathway and purchasing power.

• What this evidence means

The evidence across learning outcomes, assessment behaviour, governance arrangements, financing patterns, and household responses leads to an unavoidable conclusion.

Weak learning outcomes in Bangladesh are not the result of ignorance, bad luck, or recent shocks. They reflect a system that repeatedly chose expansion over mastery, credentials over credibility, and visible success over learning integrity. These choices were sustained over time, reinforced by political incentives, institutional self-protection, and economic interests that benefited from credential expansion without learning enforcement.

Underperformance was predictable. It persisted because it was politically and administratively acceptable. The system delivered enrolment, infrastructure, and certificates. It did not consistently deliver learning.

For millions of children, this has meant years spent in classrooms without acquiring the skills needed to read with confidence, reason effectively, or participate fully in society. The cost is borne in constrained lives, narrowed choices, and foreclosed futures.

Bangladesh now faces a narrowing window to convert its demographic opportunity into a learning dividend. Appendix A documents the evidence in full. This Vision responds to it.

The question is no longer whether the problems are known. The question is whether the system is willing to act differently, and to accept the political, institutional, and moral consequences of doing so.

Chapter 3. Why learning does not improve: the system problem

This chaptershows that weak learning persists because the education system is able to function without learning improvement.explains how incentives, accountability, and assessment reward compliance, coverage, and risk avoidance rather than mastery.demonstrates that teachers, officials, and households respond rationally to these signals, even when outcomes are poor.shows why reforms added on top of existing structures are absorbed, diluted, or reversed rather than changing behaviour.explains that learning does not improve when exposing failure is risky and maintaining appearances is safer.concludes that learning will not improve through more initiatives alone, but only when system rules, signals, and consequences change.establishes that sequencing matters, because some changes must come first to make improvement possible.This chaptershows that weak learning persists because the education system is able to function without learning improvement.explains how incentives, accountability, and assessment reward compliance, coverage, and risk avoidance rather than mastery.demonstrates that teachers, officials, and households respond rationally to these signals, even when outcomes are poor.shows why reforms added on top of existing structures are absorbed, diluted, or reversed rather than changing behaviour.explains that learning does not improve when exposing failure is risky and maintaining appearances is safer.concludes that learning will not improve through more initiatives alone, but only when system rules, signals, and consequences change.establishes that sequencing matters, because some changes must come first to make improvement possible. This chaptershows that weak learning persists because the education system is able to function without learning improvement.explains how incentives, accountability, and assessment reward compliance, coverage, and risk avoidance rather than mastery.demonstrates that teachers, officials, and households respond rationally to these signals, even when outcomes are poor.shows why reforms added on top of existing structures are absorbed, diluted, or reversed rather than changing behaviour.explains that learning does not improve when exposing failure is risky and maintaining appearances is safer.concludes that learning will not improve through more initiatives alone, but only when system rules, signals, and consequences change.establishes that sequencing matters, because some changes must come first to make improvement possible.This chaptershows that weak learning persists because the education system is able to function without learning improvement.explains how incentives, accountability, and assessment reward compliance, coverage, and risk avoidance rather than mastery.demonstrates that teachers, officials, and households respond rationally to these signals, even when outcomes are poor.shows why reforms added on top of existing structures are absorbed, diluted, or reversed rather than changing behaviour.explains that learning does not improve when exposing failure is risky and maintaining appearances is safer.concludes that learning will not improve through more initiatives alone, but only when system rules, signals, and consequences change.establishes that sequencing matters, because some changes must come first to make improvement possible.

The patterns described in Chapter 2 are not a collection of unrelated failures. They reflect the predictable behaviour of a complex system operating under stable but poor incentives, constraints, and signals over time. When learning does not determine progression, status, or institutional survival, effort shifts elsewhere. When information carries no consequence, it ceases to guide behaviour. When risk is punished and compliance is rewarded, adaptation slows and ineffective routines harden.

This chapter explains why learning outcomes in Bangladesh have remained weak despite repeated initiatives, policy announcements, and technical adjustments. The problem is not that solutions were unknown or expertise was unavailable. It is that the education system has been actively shaped in ways that make genuine learning improvement difficult, costly, and politically inconvenient to pursue. Over time, the system came to privilege visible expansion, controllable metrics, and administrative safety over learning integrity.

In such a system, reform fails because it threatens established incentives, routines, and interests. Initiatives are introduced as additions rather than disruptions. They coexist with unchanged assessment regimes, accountability structures, and political incentives, and are therefore absorbed, neutralised, or reversed. What persists is a stable low-learning equilibrium that is actively maintained because changing it is harder, riskier, and less rewarding than preserving it.

The purpose of this chapter is threefold. First, it explains what kind of system the education sector has become. Second, it shows how the low-learning equilibrium is sustained and defended in practice. Third, it sets out what it means to change a system before adding further initiatives. Appendix B presents the technical system logic underpinning this analysis. This chapter focuses on what that logic means in plain terms.

• What kind of system we are dealing with

Education is not a collection of independent parts. It is a system made up of classrooms, examinations, curricula, financing rules, supervision arrangements, political incentives, labour markets, households, and social norms. These elements interact continuously. What happens in one part of the system shapes behaviour elsewhere, often with delays that make cause and effect difficult to see.

Because of this interdependence, changing one component in isolation rarely changes outcomes. New curricula are filtered through existing examinations. Teacher training is shaped by classroom conditions, inspection practices, and social expectations. Data systems influence behaviour only if they carry consequences. Household decisions respond to assessment signals, not to policy intent.

Outcomes are therefore not the sum of individual effort or goodwill. They are the product of how the system behaves as a whole. When incentives, risks, and rewards point in one direction, effort flows that way, regardless of stated goals. This is why education systems can appear busy and reform-active while remaining stuck. Activity continues, but learning does not improve.

This reality matters because it explains why long lists of initiatives, even when they appear sensible on paper, rarely achieve their intended purpose. In a system whose structure blocks learning improvement, programmes struggle to take root. In some cases, initiatives do harm by creating new ways to perform compliance without changing practice.

• The low-learning equilibrium

Bangladesh’s education system operates in a low-learning equilibrium. Weak learning outcomes are not temporary deviations, implementation gaps, or short-term shocks. They are the system’s normal state.

An equilibrium is defined by what a system reliably produces and sustains. In this case, the education system consistently delivers:

• high enrolment and visible access,
• widespread certification and examination participation,
• administratively manageable performance indicators,
• politically usable claims of progress.

At the same time, it consistently fails to deliver:

• secure foundational learning,
• credible assessment of mastery,
• timely correction when students fall behind,
• sustained instructional improvement inside classrooms.

This combination is not accidental. The system has stabilised around outputs that are visible, controllable, and politically useful, while treating learning as an implicit by-product rather than a binding requirement. As long as certificates can be issued, grades can be managed, and progression can continue, the system remains functional in administrative and political terms, even when learning is weak.

What makes this an equilibrium is that changing it is harder than maintaining it. Improving learning would require confronting assessment credibility, protecting instructional time, enforcing standards that expose failure, and disrupting entrenched routines and interests.

This equilibrium is reproduced through everyday decisions made by administrators, teachers, political actors, and households, each responding rationally to the incentives, risks, and constraints they face. The result is not conspiracy, but a system in which disturbing the status quo is consistently more costly than preserving it.

• Administrative survival and risk avoidance

Within the bureaucracy, survival depends on compliance rather than problem solving. Reporting requirements are clear. Expectations around learning improvement are diffuse and weakly enforced. Speaking plainly about failure carries risk, while managing indicators is safer.

In this environment, maintaining acceptable numbers becomes more important than confronting uncomfortable truths. Learning problems are acknowledged in principle, but rarely pursued to the point where they disrupt routines or expose responsibility. Managing appearances becomes rational behaviour.

• Classroom reality

Teachers operate under intense pressure to complete syllabi, prepare students for examinations, and conform to established norms. Class sizes are large. Instructional time is constrained. Deviating from the expected pace or approach carries social and professional cost.

A teacher who slows down to ensure understanding risks being labelled ineffective or uncooperative. A teacher who experiments risks inspection queries, parental complaints, or informal sanction. Doing the right thing is often harder, riskier, and less rewarded than doing what has always been done.

• Assessment dominance and distorted signalling

Assessment dominates the system. Examinations determine progression, status, and opportunity. Yet assessment practices have become weakly connected to learning.

High pass rates and grade inflation are politically useful. When credibility falters, volatility is tolerated if headline stability can be restored. This creates space for administrative discretion and further undermines trust in credentials.

When assessment rewards coverage and risk management rather than mastery, actors respond accordingly. Teaching narrows. Learning becomes strategic. Reform efforts that challenge this logic face resistance, both overt and subtle.

• Household adaptation

Families respond rationally to uncertainty. When grades cannot be trusted, households turn to private tutoring and coaching to manage risk. Private expenditure compensates for system weakness.

This adaptation stabilises the equilibrium. Families protect their children individually rather than demanding collective change. Inequality widens, but the system remains politically manageable. No single actor causes the problem. But many actors have reasons not to disturb it.

Teaching adapts toexam survivalTeaching adapts toexam survivalTeaching adapts toexam survivalTeaching adapts toexam survivalSystem remains functional without learningSystem remains functional without learningSystem remains functional without learningSystem remains functional without learningFigure 3.1. The low-learning equilibrium

Assessment rewardscoverage & stabilityAssessment rewardscoverage & stabilityAssessment rewardscoverage & stabilityAssessment rewardscoverage & stabilityResults are managed, not confrontedResults are managed, not confrontedResults are managed, not confrontedResults are managed, not confronted

Risk of exposure is highRisk of exposure is highRisk of exposure is highRisk of exposure is highLearning remains weakLearning remains weakLearning remains weakLearning remains weak

Notes: This diagram illustrates how assessment, incentives, and risk management interact to produce a stable system in which weak learning persists without triggering correction. The equilibrium is not the result of individual failure, but of system signals that reward stability and absorb exposure rather than confronting learning gaps.

• Why doing the right things in a bad system does not yield better outcomes

Bangladesh has not experienced a simple story of well-designed reforms that failed to scale. Some initiatives were technically sound but poorly matched to the realities of a low-trust, politicised system. Others prioritised visibility, control, or narrative management over learning. Still others actively weakened the learning environment by embedding politicisation, eroding merit norms, and enabling rent-seeking around curriculum, recruitment, and procurement.

A recurring pattern has been the substitution of appearance for change. When the system needed to confront assessment credibility, instructional time, teacher effort, and accountability, it often chose safer alternatives: slogans, revised formats, pilots, platforms, trainings, or announcements. These actions created movement without disruption. Incentives remained intact while progress was signalled.

This pattern was reinforced by the selective importation of international best practice. Models developed in high-trust, high-capacity contexts were transplanted into a system characterised by fragmented authority and politicised implementation. Rather than transforming practice, these reforms were filtered through existing routines. Compliance replaced commitment. Documentation replaced learning.

More seriously, some system choices actively degraded the learning environment. Politicised curriculum content narrowed classroom space and weakened trust. Textbook development and procurement became channels for patronage, producing poor materials and weak instructional value. Politicised recruitment and postings eroded professional norms, signalling that effort was optional and accountability selective. Instructional time was routinely sacrificed to administrative and political visibility, demonstrating that symbolism mattered more than mastery.

Taken together, these practices reinforced the low-learning equilibrium by making credible assessment, professional effort, and instructional integrity politically and administratively costly.

In this environment, even helpful interventions struggle to survive. Teachers who slow down risk sanction. Headteachers who protect learning time risk conflict. Officials who push for assessment credibility risk backlash if results fall. Learning improvement becomes personally risky.

This explains why initiative stacking produces little change. New curriculum language combined with unchanged examinations produces no change. Training without follow-through produces no change. Monitoring without consequence produces no change. In some cases, reforms deepen the equilibrium by expanding the repertoire of compliance.

The lesson is not that reform is impossible. It is that the system must change before reforms can work, and that some entrenched practices must be confronted directly rather than bypassed.

Figure 3.2 Why initiatives fail to change outcomes

Initiative introduced		System rules unchanged
New curriculum		Same exams
Teacher training	Absorbed or neutralised	Same incentives
Technology		Same accountability
Pilot		Same political risk

Notes: When reforms are introduced without altering examinations, incentives, accountability, or political risk, they are absorbed into existing routines. Activity increases, but behaviour does not change. Learning outcomes therefore remain largely unchanged.

• Accountability and the dominance of non-learning signals

Accountability for learning is largely absent from Bangladesh’s education system. What exists instead is strong accountability for reporting, procedural compliance, and the maintenance of politically acceptable indicators.

Accountability here does not mean punishment or inspection. It means that learning outcomes carry consequence. Expectations are clear, signals are observable, and failure to improve triggers response rather than accommodation.

In Bangladesh, the strongest consequences attach to non-learning objectives. Schools are judged on enrolment, coverage, examination participation, and compliance. Officials are rewarded for managing processes and avoiding disruption. Political actors benefit from stable headline indicators. None of these require learning to improve.

As a result, learning does not dominate decision-making. It consistently loses to signals that are more visible, controllable, and less risky. Data on learning accumulates but rarely compels action. Supervision focuses on documentation rather than instruction. The low-learning equilibrium persists because accountability is misdirected. The system enforces the wrong things.

• Changing a system, not adding initiatives

Because accountability is misaligned, adding initiatives does not change outcomes. New programmes enter a system whose incentives, risks, and routines remain intact. They are interpreted, reshaped, or neutralised to fit existing patterns of behaviour.

Signals must change before behaviour can change. When learning carries consequence, effort follows. When it does not, effort flows toward safer substitutes such as compliance, coverage, and risk management. System change therefore requires altering the conditions under which everyday decisions are made.

Credibility must be restored before stakes are raised. Instructional time and professional norms must be protected before new expectations are imposed. Consequences for learning must be visible and predictable, so that improvement becomes safer than avoidance.

Early gains matter because they change beliefs about whether effort leads to results. Beliefs shape behaviour, and behaviour stabilises systems. This is why sequencing is not a technical preference but a structural necessity. Some changes must come first to make others possible.

Taken together, the diagnosis in this chapter shows that learning remains fragile not because of a lack of effort or activity, but because the system repeatedly weakens the conditions under which learning can accumulate. Effort is risky. Feedback is weak or delayed. Trust is thin. Signals pull in different directions. Readiness is uneven and unaddressed. These are not separate problems. They are recurring features of how the system currently behaves.

Appendix B sets out the technical system logic underpinning this argument. What matters here is the implication: learning will not improve until the system is reshaped so that these core conditions consistently support, rather than undermine, everyday learning

• From system diagnosis to learning dynamics

The purpose of this chapter has been diagnostic. It has shown why learning does not improve in Bangladesh despite repeated reform efforts, and how incentives, accountability structures, assessment practices, and political pressures combine to stabilise a low-learning equilibrium.

That diagnosis also reveals something else. Across different levels of the system, the same dynamics appear again and again. When learning falters, it is because students are not ready to engage, effort is not rewarded, feedback arrives too late or not at all, trust is weak, or signals are misaligned. When learning improves, even temporarily, it is because these conditions briefly move in the right direction.

This observation matters because it clarifies the direction of change. Learning will not improve through additional programmes layered onto existing structures. It will improve only when the system is reshaped so that readiness, motivation, feedback, trust, and alignment consistently support learning in everyday practice.

That shift cannot begin with institutions alone. Education systems reproduce themselves through lived experience. What teachers do each day, how students experience effort and correction, what parents can see and trust, and whether learning appears to lead somewhere all determine whether incentives change in practice.

For this reason, the next chapter changes perspective. Rather than extending the system diagnosis, it steps inside the learning journey itself. It asks what a Bangladeshi child and family should experience, year by year, if these core dynamics were working in favour of learning rather than against it.

Chapter 4 therefore does not present reforms, programmes, or mechanisms. It presents the learning experience that the system must be capable of producing before technical change can take hold. The chapters that follow then return to institutions, accountability, and implementation, showing how that experience can be made possible

Chapter 4. The Learning Journey: What a Child and Family Should Experience if the System Worked

This chapterreframes education from institutional stages to a continuous learning journey experienced by children and families.describes what learning should feel like, year by year, if the system worked as intended.shows how learning accumulates when readiness, motivation, feedback, trust, and alignment are present.demonstrates how early foundations determine whether later stages deepen learning or compound loss.illustrates how classrooms change when learning time is protected and feedback is immediate and safe.clarifies what families should see, understand, and trust at each stage of schooling.establishes the lived experience that governance and reform must make normal, not exceptional.This chapterreframes education from institutional stages to a continuous learning journey experienced by children and families.describes what learning should feel like, year by year, if the system worked as intended.shows how learning accumulates when readiness, motivation, feedback, trust, and alignment are present.demonstrates how early foundations determine whether later stages deepen learning or compound loss.illustrates how classrooms change when learning time is protected and feedback is immediate and safe.clarifies what families should see, understand, and trust at each stage of schooling.establishes the lived experience that governance and reform must make normal, not exceptional. This chapterreframes education from institutional stages to a continuous learning journey experienced by children and families.describes what learning should feel like, year by year, if the system worked as intended.shows how learning accumulates when readiness, motivation, feedback, trust, and alignment are present.demonstrates how early foundations determine whether later stages deepen learning or compound loss.illustrates how classrooms change when learning time is protected and feedback is immediate and safe.clarifies what families should see, understand, and trust at each stage of schooling.establishes the lived experience that governance and reform must make normal, not exceptional.This chapterreframes education from institutional stages to a continuous learning journey experienced by children and families.describes what learning should feel like, year by year, if the system worked as intended.shows how learning accumulates when readiness, motivation, feedback, trust, and alignment are present.demonstrates how early foundations determine whether later stages deepen learning or compound loss.illustrates how classrooms change when learning time is protected and feedback is immediate and safe.clarifies what families should see, understand, and trust at each stage of schooling.establishes the lived experience that governance and reform must make normal, not exceptional.

This chapter asks a simple but demanding question: what should a Bangladeshi child and their family be able to expect, year by year, if the education system worked as intended?

Not in policy language, and not from the perspective of institutions, but in lived experience. What learning should feel like on an ordinary school day. What support should be visible. What signals should be clear. What routines should be reliable.

Chapter 3 showed why the current system fails to deliver this experience. It traced how incentives, accountability structures, assessment practices, and political pressures repeatedly weaken the conditions under which learning can accumulate. Across these failures, five dynamics consistently emerged as decisive: readiness, motivation, feedback, trust, and alignment.

This chapter takes those dynamics seriously and re-expresses them from the learner’s point of view. It describes education as a learning journey rather than a sequence of disconnected stages. Skills, confidence, identity, and aspiration accumulate over time. When early foundations are secure, later learning becomes possible. When they are weak, each transition becomes a point of loss.

What follows is not a list of reforms or initiatives. It is a coherent picture of the learning experience the system must be capable of delivering if learning is to become cumulative rather than fragile. The chapters that follow then return to the question of how institutions, governance, and implementation must change to make that journey real.

• Early Childhood and Readiness: Arriving Ready to Learn

Learning does not begin on the first day of Grade 1. Children arrive in classrooms with very different levels of language exposure, confidence, health, emotional regulation, and familiarity

with structured interaction. These differences are not random. They reflect household conditions, nutrition, access to early learning, and whether children have previously experienced adults responding to their curiosity.

When the system ignores these differences, inequality hardens immediately. Children who struggle early learn that school is a place of confusion and correction rather than discovery. Teachers, facing wide variation and fixed pacing expectations, move on. Gaps widen quietly and persist.

A learning-oriented system treats early childhood not as optional preparation, but as a core readiness function. Its purpose is not acceleration or early formal instruction. Its purpose is to ensure that children arrive in Grade 1 able to participate: to listen, speak, count, play, follow routines, and see themselves as learners.

What readiness means in practice

Readiness is not a checklist of discrete skills. It is a state of participation. Children who are ready can sit in a group, take turns, ask questions, and persist when something is difficult. They recognise sounds and symbols, but more importantly, they are willing to try.

This readiness is built through ordinary, repeatable routines: language-rich interaction through stories and conversation; predictable daily structure supported by regular meals; and opportunities to speak, play, and be heard in ways that connect learning to home and community life. These are not enrichment activities. They are the conditions under which learning becomes possible.

Alongside Bangla and home languages, early exposure to spoken English through songs, stories, and everyday classroom interaction supports listening, confidence, and cognitive flexibility, without introducing formal instruction or assessment.

Alignment between early learning and primary school

Early childhood works only when it is aligned with what follows. When pre-primary emphasises play, language, and interaction, but Grade 1 immediately shifts to rapid syllabus coverage and copying, readiness is wasted. Children who arrive curious quickly learn to stay quiet.

In a coherent system, early childhood and early primary reinforce one another. Play-based exploration gives way gradually to structured learning. Language-rich interaction supports early literacy. Feedback is immediate and gentle. Children experience early success and begin to associate effort with progress. This alignment is achieved not through new documents, but through shared expectations, simple routines, and protected time for early learning.

Trust, motivation, and early identity

Early childhood is where trust in the system is first formed. Children learn whether school is a place where mistakes are punished or treated as part of learning. Parents learn whether schools notice their children as individuals or only as numbers.

When early learning environments are calm, predictable, and respectful, children develop confidence. When teachers respond to what children say and do, motivation emerges naturally. No slogans are required.

Vignette: Early childhood experience of Chingma, Age 5In the morning, we sing a song in Bangla and then one in Chakma. The teacher lets us choose which one to start with. I like the Chakma song because my grandmother sings it at home.On the way to school, I pick up a few small stones near the path. When we sit in a circle, the teacher asks us to talk about what we saw on the way. I show my stones. She asks how many there are. We count them together on the floor.Before we go home, we eat lunch at school. I feel less tired in the afternoon now. I like coming to school.Vignette: Early childhood experience of Chingma, Age 5In the morning, we sing a song in Bangla and then one in Chakma. The teacher lets us choose which one to start with. I like the Chakma song because my grandmother sings it at home.On the way to school, I pick up a few small stones near the path. When we sit in a circle, the teacher asks us to talk about what we saw on the way. I show my stones. She asks how many there are. We count them together on the floor.Before we go home, we eat lunch at school. I feel less tired in the afternoon now. I like coming to school.Vignette: Early childhood experience of Chingma, Age 5In the morning, we sing a song in Bangla and then one in Chakma. The teacher lets us choose which one to start with. I like the Chakma song because my grandmother sings it at home.On the way to school, I pick up a few small stones near the path. When we sit in a circle, the teacher asks us to talk about what we saw on the way. I show my stones. She asks how many there are. We count them together on the floor.Before we go home, we eat lunch at school. I feel less tired in the afternoon now. I like coming to school.Vignette: Early childhood experience of Chingma, Age 5In the morning, we sing a song in Bangla and then one in Chakma. The teacher lets us choose which one to start with. I like the Chakma song because my grandmother sings it at home.On the way to school, I pick up a few small stones near the path. When we sit in a circle, the teacher asks us to talk about what we saw on the way. I show my stones. She asks how many there are. We count them together on the floor.Before we go home, we eat lunch at school. I feel less tired in the afternoon now. I like coming to school.

This vignette captures what readiness looks like when it is working. Learning is embedded in daily life. Language and culture are respected without becoming politicised. Feedback is immediate. Food and routine support attention. The child leaves school wanting to return.

System responsibility at this stage

Early childhood readiness cannot depend on exceptional teachers or well-resourced centres alone. It must be systemically reliable. That means:

• early learning time is protected,
• meals and basic wellbeing are treated as learning supports rather than welfare add- ons,
• teachers are supported to focus on interaction rather than paperwork, and
• expectations for Grade 1 build on, rather than discard, what children have learned.

When these conditions hold, readiness becomes a stabilising force. Teachers face less extreme variation. Children experience early success. Parents begin to trust that school is helping their child learn, not merely occupy time.

Early childhood does not solve inequality. But when it works, it prevents inequality from becoming destiny. It gives the system its first real chance to behave differently.

• Foundational Primary (Grades 1–3): Learning That Builds Confidence

The first years of primary school determine whether children become independent learners or passive survivors of the system. When children master reading, writing, and basic mathematics early, they can learn from text, reason with numbers, and participate confidently. When they do not, every subsequent year becomes harder, and early gaps widen quietly.

This stage is therefore not one phase among many. It is the pivot point of the learning journey. At this stage, two dynamics are decisive: motivation and feedback. Children persist when effort leads to visible progress. They disengage when work feels repetitive, confusing, or disconnected from understanding. Teachers improve instruction when they can see what children understand as learning unfolds. They retreat to coverage and copying when feedback arrives too late or carries risk.

Learning as daily progress, not performance

Foundational learning succeeds when classrooms prioritise frequent, low-stakes practice rather than rare, high-stakes judgement. Short reading tasks, brief writing exercises, simple number work, and regular conversation allow teachers to observe learning in real time and adjust instruction immediately. Mistakes are expected. They are treated as information, not failure.

When feedback is immediate and usable, children understand what to improve and experience success quickly. Confidence grows not because tasks are easy, but because progress is visible.

Vignette: Rafi, Age 8

Last Sunday, we started with reading time. I chose a book with pictures of buses and roads.

After reading, we wrote two sentences. Mine was short. The teacher circled one word and showed me how to make it clearer. I tried again.

In maths, we watched a short video about mangoes being made into mango juice and amshotto. Then we went to the mango tree in our school yard and counted the mangoes together. We wrote the numbers and talked about which group had more. My friend explained it one way. I explained it another way.

After break, we do a short quiz. It is only a few questions. The teacher says it helps her see who needs more help this week.

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At the end of the week, I brought home three books: one easy, one harder, and one with new words. My father asked which one I liked best.

I felt proud when I finished a book and understood it.

This vignette illustrates how motivation and feedback emerge through ordinary classroom routines rather than formal testing.

Protecting learning time and attention

Foundational learning is fragile. It depends on time, consistency, and attention. When instructional time is routinely interrupted, when teachers are rushed to complete syllabi, or when classrooms are overcrowded without support, early learning breaks down.

In a learning-oriented system, Grades 1–3 are protected. Instructional time is predictable. Daily routines are stable. Children eat during the school day so that concentration is possible. Teachers are supported to focus on instruction rather than administrative tasks. These protections are not enhancements. They are preconditions.

Alignment between curriculum, teaching, and assessment

Foundational learning works only when curriculum expectations, classroom practice, and assessment reinforce one another. When curriculum emphasises comprehension but assessment rewards recall, teaching narrows. When assessment is delayed or disconnected from instruction, feedback loses value.

In a coherent system, early assessments are simple, frequent, and used locally. They help teachers group students, adjust pacing, and identify who needs support. They are not used to rank schools or punish teachers. Their purpose is improvement, not signalling.

Within this aligned structure, continued exposure to spoken English through routine classroom interaction supports comprehension and confidence, without becoming a separate instructional burden or an assessed priority at this stage.

When feedback mechanisms are short and safe, teachers adapt. When they are long and punitive, teachers protect themselves.

The system responsibility at this stage

Foundational primary cannot depend on exceptional teachers alone. It must be systemically reliable. That means:

• feedback is embedded in everyday teaching,
• learning time is protected,
• early assessment supports instruction rather than anxiety,
• and success is defined by mastery rather than coverage.

When this stage works, later learning becomes possible. When it fails, every subsequent reform must compensate for what was missed.

Foundational learning does not require innovation. It requires discipline, alignment, and protection. When those conditions hold, children do not merely pass through school. They begin to own their learning.

• Upper Primary (Grades 4–5): Trust and Reasoning

Upper primary is the stage where learning either deepens or quietly thins out. Students are expected to move beyond decoding and calculation toward explanation, reasoning, and

application. Whether this transition succeeds depends less on curriculum ambition than on whether classrooms are organised around trust.

Trust changes behaviour. It allows teachers to slow down without fear of sanction. It allows students to speak, disagree, and revise their thinking without embarrassment. It allows supervision to focus on instructional quality rather than surface compliance. Where trust is weak, classrooms revert to recitation and coverage. Where it is present, understanding becomes possible.

Learning through explanation and collaboration

In a learning-oriented system, upper primary classrooms make thinking visible. Students explain their reasoning, compare approaches, and learn from one another. Group work is structured and purposeful rather than performative. Writing is used to clarify ideas rather than reproduce text.

As reasoning deepens, structured opportunities to use English orally for explanation and discussion help normalise it as a language of thinking, without yet elevating it to a high-stakes or dominant instructional medium.

Feedback at this stage evolves from simple correctness to clarity and logic. Teachers need timely signals about how students are thinking so that misconceptions can be addressed before they harden. Short written responses, oral explanations, simple projects, and guided discussion provide this feedback when they are used locally and immediately. When feedback is reduced to marks or delayed judgement, reasoning gives way to performance.

Vignette: Upper Primary Students, Grade 5At the end of the week, we had a shortThis week, we worked in groups to plan a test. It was not like the exam. The teacher small garden behind the school. The said it helps the school see whether teacher gave us a sheet with three students in different classes are learning questions to answer. We measured the the same things.space and wrote instructions.I showed my mother the pictures at home.When two groups disagreed, the teacher asked us to explain our reasons. She wrote two questions on the board that everyone had to answer in their notebooks.We used a tablet to take photos and upload them to the class folder. The teacher showed us examples from another school. She said they were learning the same topic.Vignette: Upper Primary Students, Grade 5At the end of the week, we had a shortThis week, we worked in groups to plan a test. It was not like the exam. The teacher small garden behind the school. The said it helps the school see whether teacher gave us a sheet with three students in different classes are learning questions to answer. We measured the the same things.space and wrote instructions.I showed my mother the pictures at home.When two groups disagreed, the teacher asked us to explain our reasons. She wrote two questions on the board that everyone had to answer in their notebooks.We used a tablet to take photos and upload them to the class folder. The teacher showed us examples from another school. She said they were learning the same topic. Vignette: Upper Primary Students, Grade 5At the end of the week, we had a shortThis week, we worked in groups to plan a test. It was not like the exam. The teacher small garden behind the school. The said it helps the school see whether teacher gave us a sheet with three students in different classes are learning questions to answer. We measured the the same things.space and wrote instructions.I showed my mother the pictures at home.When two groups disagreed, the teacher asked us to explain our reasons. She wrote two questions on the board that everyone had to answer in their notebooks.We used a tablet to take photos and upload them to the class folder. The teacher showed us examples from another school. She said they were learning the same topic.Vignette: Upper Primary Students, Grade 5At the end of the week, we had a shortThis week, we worked in groups to plan a test. It was not like the exam. The teacher small garden behind the school. The said it helps the school see whether teacher gave us a sheet with three students in different classes are learning questions to answer. We measured the the same things.space and wrote instructions.I showed my mother the pictures at home.When two groups disagreed, the teacher asked us to explain our reasons. She wrote two questions on the board that everyone had to answer in their notebooks.We used a tablet to take photos and upload them to the class folder. The teacher showed us examples from another school. She said they were learning the same topic.

Protecting space for deeper learning

Reasoning develops through discussion, revision, and reflection. It requires time and stability. When lessons are rushed, classrooms are frequently interrupted, or teachers feel pressure to prioritise coverage over understanding, this stage collapses into surface learning.

In a coherent system, upper primary is protected. Teachers are trusted to manage pacing. Supervisors focus on instructional quality rather than checklist compliance. Schools are encouraged to adapt lessons to student understanding rather than adhere rigidly to uniform schedules.

The system responsibility at this stage

Upper primary cannot rely on individual teacher confidence or goodwill. For reasoning to develop consistently, the system must make trust the safer option.

This requires:

• protecting instructional time so discussion and revision are possible,
• allowing teachers discretion over pacing without penalty,
• using supervision to support instructional quality rather than enforce uniform coverage,
• and ensuring that assessment at this stage rewards explanation rather than recall.

These conditions do not require new curricula or complex reform. They require restraint. They require the system to stop interrupting, rushing, and second-guessing classroom judgement at precisely the point where deeper learning begins.

When these conditions hold, upper primary classrooms become places where thinking is normalised and visible. When they do not, fragile learning is carried forward into later years, where it becomes far harder to repair.

• Lower Secondary (Grades 6–8): Language, Reasoning, and Belonging

Lower secondary is a turning point. Students are expected to move beyond basic skills and begin interpreting texts, explaining ideas, and applying learning to unfamiliar situations. It is also the stage at which many students begin to disengage. The work becomes harder, the curriculum more abstract, and the consequences of falling behind more visible. If confidence and trust are not established at this point, learning quickly becomes mechanical or avoidant.

Language sits at the centre of this transition. Bangla as well as English are no longer only a subject to be memorised. It becomes the medium through which students must understand instructions, express reasoning, and engage with the world beyond school. When language learning is reduced to rote reproduction, students struggle silently. When it is treated as a tool for interpretation and explanation, confidence grows.

At this stage, trust is decisive. Students need to feel safe to speak imperfectly. Teachers need space to slow down, revisit concepts, and adapt lessons based on evidence rather than pace alone. Feedback must be frequent and usable, signalling what matters and what to work on next. Assessment begins to matter more, but it must still function as guidance rather than threat.

Enablers shape whether this is possible. Regular meals affect concentration. Predictable routines reduce anxiety. Modest digital tools support explanation and practice. Short, school- wide assessments help teachers see patterns and respond before gaps widen. When these conditions hold, lower secondary becomes a period of consolidation rather than loss.

In this kind of lower secondary classroom, learning is visible and purposeful. Language connects school to everyday life. Feedback clarifies expectations. Assessment provides direction rather than anxiety. Digital tools support explanation without replacing teaching. Students begin to see themselves as capable of reasoning, not merely repeating.

Vignette: Lower Secondary Students, Grades 7

In English class, our teacher asked us to bring a short text from home. My older sister helped me find a story from an old magazine about a boy travelling by launch on the river.

We read the story in class and underlined words we did not understand. The teacher asked us to guess their meaning from the sentence. When we were unsure, she showed us how to look them up using a dictionary app, which she shared on the classroom screen.

Later, she showed us a photo of a real launch ticket. We worked in pairs to read it carefully. We looked for the date, the destination, the seat number, and the price.

<br>Some of the words were printed very small. The teacher asked why it mattered to read them properly. She said this was also English.

After reading, we wrote a short paragraph explaining either the story or the ticket in our own words. The teacher did not give marks. She circled a few sentences and wrote brief notes. She said this helped her see who needed more practice with explanation.

Every few weeks, all students in our grade do a short English test. The teacher showed us a simple chart with the results. I read well, but my writing is still weak. She told me exactly what to practise and gave me a small exercise to take home.

In this kind of lower secondary classroom, learning is visible and purposeful. Language connects school to everyday life. Feedback clarifies expectations. Assessment provides direction rather than anxiety. Digital tools support explanation without replacing teaching. Students begin to see themselves as capable of reasoning, not merely repeating.In this kind of lower secondary classroom, learning is visible and purposeful. Language connects school to everyday life. Feedback clarifies expectations. Assessment provides direction rather than anxiety. Digital tools support explanation without replacing teaching. Students begin to see themselves as capable of reasoning, not merely repeating.In this kind of lower secondary classroom, learning is visible and purposeful. Language connects school to everyday life. Feedback clarifies expectations. Assessment provides direction rather than anxiety. Digital tools support explanation without replacing teaching. Students begin to see themselves as capable of reasoning, not merely repeating.In this kind of lower secondary classroom, learning is visible and purposeful. Language connects school to everyday life. Feedback clarifies expectations. Assessment provides direction rather than anxiety. Digital tools support explanation without replacing teaching. Students begin to see themselves as capable of reasoning, not merely repeating.At 11 everyday, we eat at school. I feel less tired during writing lessons now. On some days, we use the computer room to type our paragraphs. The computers are slow, but I like seeing my writing on the screen. I am learning how to understand and explain what I read, not just memorise it. Bangla feels useful, not frightening.

This is the stage at which many systems lose students quietly. It is also the stage at which the system can still pull them back. When trust, feedback, and alignment hold together, lower secondary strengthens foundations instead of eroding them, preparing students to face the pressures and choices that follow in upper grades.

• Secondary (Grades 9–10): Credible Signals and Real Choice

Secondary education is where learning becomes consequential. Examinations carry weight. Pathways begin to narrow. Decisions start to feel permanent. Anxiety rises sharply when assessment signals are unclear, volatile, or untrusted.

In a learning-oriented system, secondary education provides credible signals. Students understand what they know, what they need to improve, and what options lie ahead. Assessment informs learning rather than overwhelming it. When signals are stable and intelligible, effort becomes purposeful. When they are not, effort turns strategic and defensive.

Assessment as information, not threat

At this stage, feedback must be clear, timely, and interpretable. Students should be able to answer simple questions: What am I doing well? Where am I struggling? What should I work on next?

This does not require constant testing or high-stakes judgement. It requires assessments that are aligned with classroom practice and explained in ways that make sense to students and families. When results are predictable and connected to learning, anxiety declines and focus improves.

Vignette: Secondary school experience of Nosheen and Baisakhi, Grade 9.After our science test, the teacher gives usMy parents receive a message explaining the a sheet showing which skills we haveresults and what support the school will mastered and which we still need toprovide if I struggle. It feels like the school practise. The same format is used in otherknows what it is doing.schools. My results are not a surprise. We have done similar questions in class and online, and the teacher showed usexamples before the test. Once a term, theteacher meets with us to talk aboutpathways. She explains different options, including technical training and further academic study. She tells us what subjects matter for each one.Vignette: Secondary school experience of Nosheen and Baisakhi, Grade 9.After our science test, the teacher gives usMy parents receive a message explaining the a sheet showing which skills we haveresults and what support the school will mastered and which we still need toprovide if I struggle. It feels like the school practise. The same format is used in otherknows what it is doing.schools. My results are not a surprise. We have done similar questions in class and online, and the teacher showed usexamples before the test. Once a term, theteacher meets with us to talk aboutpathways. She explains different options, including technical training and further academic study. She tells us what subjects matter for each one. Vignette: Secondary school experience of Nosheen and Baisakhi, Grade 9.After our science test, the teacher gives usMy parents receive a message explaining the a sheet showing which skills we haveresults and what support the school will mastered and which we still need toprovide if I struggle. It feels like the school practise. The same format is used in otherknows what it is doing. schools. My results are not a surprise. We have done similar questions in class and online, and the teacher showed usexamples before the test. Once a term, theteacher meets with us to talk aboutpathways. She explains different options, including technical training and further academic study. She tells us what subjects matter for each one.Vignette: Secondary school experience of Nosheen and Baisakhi, Grade 9.After our science test, the teacher gives usMy parents receive a message explaining the a sheet showing which skills we haveresults and what support the school will mastered and which we still need toprovide if I struggle. It feels like the school practise. The same format is used in otherknows what it is doing. schools. My results are not a surprise. We have done similar questions in class and online, and the teacher showed usexamples before the test. Once a term, theteacher meets with us to talk aboutpathways. She explains different options, including technical training and further academic study. She tells us what subjects matter for each one.

In classrooms like this, assessment supports decision-making rather than fear. Results are specific. Weaknesses are identifiable. Improvement feels possible. Students focus on learning rather than gaming the system.

When assessment signals are weak or unstable, the opposite occurs. Anxiety rises. Shortcuts proliferate. Trust erodes quickly.

Choice requires guidance

Secondary education introduces choice, but choice without guidance is abandonment. In a functioning system, schools provide structured conversations about pathways. Academic, technical, and vocational routes are presented as legitimate options with progression and dignity.

Students are not funnelled silently. They are informed deliberately. Guidance connects learning to future possibilities without reducing education to narrow job preparation. It helps students understand how subjects, skills, and qualifications relate to further study, work, and mobility.

Clear guidance also reduces inequality. When information is shared openly, families rely less on private coaching and insider knowledge to manage risk.

Alignment at high stakes

Secondary education works when curriculum, assessment, and pathways send the same message: learning matters, and multiple futures are possible. When assessment rewards memorisation while pathways demand competence, trust breaks down.

High-stakes moments test systems. Integrity must be actively protected. Clear standards, transparent marking, and predictable rules are not technical details. They are what allow effort to remain directed toward learning rather than distortion.

The system responsibility at this stage

Secondary education cannot eliminate pressure. But it can determine where that pressure points.

That requires:

• assessment practices that are stable, interpretable, and aligned with teaching,
• clear communication of results to students and families,
• structured guidance on pathways before decisions become irreversible,
• and protection of assessment integrity so signals remain credible.

When these conditions hold, students invest effort with purpose rather than fear. Families trust the system enough to engage rather than hedge. Schools can focus on learning rather than damage control.

When they do not, anxiety dominates, shortcuts proliferate, and secondary education amplifies inequality rather than opportunity.

• Upper Secondary (Grades 11–12): Pathways with Dignity and Direction

Upper secondary education is the point at which schooling becomes consequential. Decisions made during Grades 11 and 12 shape access to higher education, technical training, employment, and migration. For many families, this stage determines whether years of schooling translate into opportunity or stall without direction.

In Bangladesh, upper secondary has often functioned as a narrow academic filter rather than a stage of preparation. Prestige is attached to a limited set of academic outcomes, while technical and vocational routes are treated as residual. Guidance is weak, information is fragmented, and examination pressure dominates everyday experience. As a result, students frequently invest effort without a clear sense of what that effort is leading toward.

In a learning-oriented system, upper secondary does something different. It provides clarity rather than compression. It connects learning to credible futures without pretending that all constraints can be removed. Dignity at this stage comes from visibility, guidance, and honest signalling, not from eliminating examinations or promising outcomes the system cannot deliver.

Learning with purpose, not abstraction

At this stage, learning should feel connected to life beyond school. Subjects remain demanding and assessments still matter, but tasks increasingly require explanation, application, and judgement rather than recall alone. Students begin to see how different subjects prepare them for different pathways, and where further effort is required.

Feedback becomes selective but meaningful. Teachers do not comment on everything. They focus on one or two aspects that matter for improvement. Students learn to revise, refine, and take responsibility for their work. Learning is no longer symbolic. It has direction.

This does not require expensive equipment or imported models. It requires using existing classrooms differently: real examples, structured discussion, short revisions, and clear expectations about what quality looks like.

Vignette: Grade 11 experience of Sameer, Age 17

In Grade 11, our teachers explained that these two years matter because they open different paths. We were not told that only one path was respectable.

In science class, we worked on an assignment about electricity use at home. We listed the appliances we use, estimated costs, and discussed how power cuts affect daily life. We did not use expensive equipment. We used notebooks, a shared school computer, and examples from our own homes.

Our teacher asked us to explain our

thinking, not just give answers. She

returned our work with short comments and asked us to improve one part. I rewrote my explanation and understood it better the second time.

Once a month, the school holds a guidance session. We are told clearly what SSC and HSC results mean for different options. Some students plan for university. Some are interested in technical institutes. Some talk openly about working abroad. Teachers explain what skills and certificates are needed, not just marks.

<br>My parents came to one meeting. The teacher explained my subjects and what they prepare me for. My parents still worry, but they understand more. They now ask me what I am learning, not only what grade I got.

Exams are still stressful. Coaching still exists. But I feel less lost. I know why I am studying these subjects and how they connect to life after school.

This vignette reflects an upper secondary experience where learning is connected to real futures. Guidance is explicit. Language and communication are treated as practical capabilities. Assessment pressure remains, but it is framed by direction rather than uncertainty.

Pathways that are visible and permeable

Upper secondary works when pathways are made visible early and treated with seriousness. Academic, technical, and vocational routes are explained clearly, using real examples rather than slogans. Students learn what qualifications are required, how progression works, and what risks and opportunities exist.

This includes acknowledging realities families already consider. For many households, overseas employment is a genuine pathway. A learning-oriented system does not ignore this or leave families to navigate it alone. It integrates preparation for language use, communication, digital literacy, and rights awareness into existing subjects rather than adding disconnected programmes.

Permeability matters. Students should not feel locked into irreversible choices at sixteen. Movement between general and technical routes must remain possible, even if imperfect. When pathways are rigid and hierarchical, anxiety narrows motivation. When they are transparent and flexible, aspiration broadens.

The role of teachers and schools at this stage

Teachers in upper secondary carry heavy content loads and operate under intense examination pressure. A realistic vision does not demand transformation without support. It requires clarity of role.

Teachers are not expected to be career counsellors or social workers. They are expected to:

• make expectations explicit,
• give limited but timely feedback,
• protect learning time,
• and participate in simple, structured guidance routines supported by the school.

Schools play a coordinating role. Even modest routines matter: one guidance session per month, one parent conversation per term, and one clear information sheet on pathways can significantly change how students and families experience this stage.

The system responsibility at this stage

Upper secondary cannot remove pressure. But it can determine where that pressure points. That requires:

• curriculum and assessment that reward explanation and application, not only recall,
• clear and honest communication of results and expectations,
• structured guidance before choices become irreversible,
• and protection of pathway credibility so effort remains meaningful.

When these conditions hold, students invest effort with direction rather than fear. Families engage with confidence rather than hedging through private expenditure. Schools focus on preparation rather than damage control.

When they do not, upper secondary nullifies earlier gains. Effort becomes brittle, trust erodes, and schooling ends without direction. This is why upper secondary is not simply another stage, but a decisive test of whether the learning journey has coherence and purpose.

• Parents, Families, and Community: Shared Responsibility

Parents and families experience the education system through signals, not policy documents. They judge whether the system is working based on what they can see, understand, and trust. When learning is opaque and assessment signals are unstable, families respond rationally by hedging through private expenditure. When learning is visible and communication is clear, trust becomes possible.

In a functioning system, families receive regular, intelligible information about what their children are learning and how they are progressing. This information does not arrive only at examination points. It is shared through simple messages, brief feedback, and conversations that explain both strengths and areas for improvement. Parents are not expected to become educators, but they are given enough clarity to support routines, encouragement, and effort at home.

Vignette: Parents of two school going girlsWe know which book she should read and what kinds of questions we can ask her at home. Sometimes we talk about the story while she is reading. Sometimes we ask her to explain something she learned in her own words. We are not guessing anymore or worrying that we are asking the wrong things. We feel more confidentThe teacher sends a short message about supporting her, even when schoolwork what our child is learning this week and feels unfamiliar to us.We feel more at what she found difficult. It tells us what she ease as parents.is practising in class and where she might need more help.Vignette: Parents of two school going girlsWe know which book she should read and what kinds of questions we can ask her at home. Sometimes we talk about the story while she is reading. Sometimes we ask her to explain something she learned in her own words. We are not guessing anymore or worrying that we are asking the wrong things. We feel more confidentThe teacher sends a short message about supporting her, even when schoolwork what our child is learning this week and feels unfamiliar to us.We feel more at what she found difficult. It tells us what she ease as parents.is practising in class and where she might need more help.Vignette: Parents of two school going girlsWe know which book she should read and what kinds of questions we can ask her at home. Sometimes we talk about the story while she is reading. Sometimes we ask her to explain something she learned in her own words. We are not guessing anymore or worrying that we are asking the wrong things. We feel more confidentThe teacher sends a short message about supporting her, even when schoolwork what our child is learning this week and feels unfamiliar to us.We feel more at what she found difficult. It tells us what she ease as parents.is practising in class and where she might need more help.Vignette: Parents of two school going girlsWe know which book she should read and what kinds of questions we can ask her at home. Sometimes we talk about the story while she is reading. Sometimes we ask her to explain something she learned in her own words. We are not guessing anymore or worrying that we are asking the wrong things. We feel more confidentThe teacher sends a short message about supporting her, even when schoolwork what our child is learning this week and feels unfamiliar to us.We feel more at what she found difficult. It tells us what she ease as parents.is practising in class and where she might need more help.

When communication works in this way, families stop managing risk alone. They begin to engage with the school as a partner rather than a hedge.

Community relationships also matter. Schools that connect with local organisations, health workers, and youth groups create broader support structures for learners. School meals, wellbeing services, and safe spaces are not peripheral benefits. They stabilise attendance, attention, and participation, particularly for students facing hardship.

The system responsibility at this stage is to make trust the easier choice for families. That requires:

• regular, comprehensible communication about learning and progress,
• feedback that explains what matters rather than simply reporting results,
• visible links between school learning and future opportunities,
• and basic supports that stabilise participation and wellbeing.

When these conditions hold, families invest time and attention rather than private substitutes. Public education regains credibility through everyday experience, not promise. Shared responsibility emerges because trust has been earned.

• Coherence Across the Learning Journey

The learning journey only works when it holds together. Early childhood readiness must support foundational mastery. Foundational mastery must support reasoning and exploration. Exploration must feed aspiration. Upper secondary must open real pathways. Each stage depends on the integrity of the one before it.

This coherence does not arise from ambition alone. It depends on alignment across curriculum, teaching, assessment, and support structures. When these elements reinforce one another, learning becomes cumulative rather than fragile. Feedback arrives in time to matter. Motivation grows because effort leads somewhere. Trust develops because signals are consistent.

Enablers such as meals, instructional time, wellbeing support, and basic digital access are not separate initiatives. They are the conditions that allow learning to occur repeatedly and reliably. When these conditions are unstable, even strong teaching struggles to take hold. When they are protected, improvement compounds.

This chapter has not presented a shopping list of reforms. It has described the learning experience that the system must be capable of delivering if learning is to improve in a sustained way. That experience is the North Star that follows from the diagnosis in Chapter 3.

The chapters that follow return to institutions, accountability, and implementation. They ask how governance, incentives, and sequencing must change so that this learning journey is no longer exceptional, but normal—and so that coherence is built deliberately rather than assumed.

Chapter 5. Curriculum, Assessment, and Learning Progression

This chapterargues that curriculum and assessment are the system’s primary coordination mechanisms, shaping behaviour far more than policy statements or reform rhetoric.shows that curriculum overload and weak sequencing undermine mastery by shifting coherence burdens onto teachers and families.demonstrates that learning progression fails when movement through grades substitutes for mastery, forcing later stages into remediation and sorting.explains how misaligned, high-stakes assessment rewards recall and predictability, hollowing out the meaning of credentials.locates accountability not in inspection or supervision, but in the signals sent by curriculum priorities and assessment design.shows how weak curriculum–assessment coherence fuels coaching markets, inequality, and loss of trust in public certification.positions curriculum coherence as both an equity instrument and an economic reform that restores the informational value of credentials.concludes that learning improvement requires altering system signals and reinforcing loops, not adding initiatives on top of incoherent structures.This chapterargues that curriculum and assessment are the system’s primary coordination mechanisms, shaping behaviour far more than policy statements or reform rhetoric.shows that curriculum overload and weak sequencing undermine mastery by shifting coherence burdens onto teachers and families.demonstrates that learning progression fails when movement through grades substitutes for mastery, forcing later stages into remediation and sorting.explains how misaligned, high-stakes assessment rewards recall and predictability, hollowing out the meaning of credentials.locates accountability not in inspection or supervision, but in the signals sent by curriculum priorities and assessment design.shows how weak curriculum–assessment coherence fuels coaching markets, inequality, and loss of trust in public certification.positions curriculum coherence as both an equity instrument and an economic reform that restores the informational value of credentials.concludes that learning improvement requires altering system signals and reinforcing loops, not adding initiatives on top of incoherent structures. This chapterargues that curriculum and assessment are the system’s primary coordination mechanisms, shaping behaviour far more than policy statements or reform rhetoric.shows that curriculum overload and weak sequencing undermine mastery by shifting coherence burdens onto teachers and families.demonstrates that learning progression fails when movement through grades substitutes for mastery, forcing later stages into remediation and sorting.explains how misaligned, high-stakes assessment rewards recall and predictability, hollowing out the meaning of credentials.locates accountability not in inspection or supervision, but in the signals sent by curriculum priorities and assessment design.shows how weak curriculum–assessment coherence fuels coaching markets, inequality, and loss of trust in public certification.positions curriculum coherence as both an equity instrument and an economic reform that restores the informational value of credentials.concludes that learning improvement requires altering system signals and reinforcing loops, not adding initiatives on top of incoherent structures.This chapterargues that curriculum and assessment are the system’s primary coordination mechanisms, shaping behaviour far more than policy statements or reform rhetoric.shows that curriculum overload and weak sequencing undermine mastery by shifting coherence burdens onto teachers and families.demonstrates that learning progression fails when movement through grades substitutes for mastery, forcing later stages into remediation and sorting.explains how misaligned, high-stakes assessment rewards recall and predictability, hollowing out the meaning of credentials.locates accountability not in inspection or supervision, but in the signals sent by curriculum priorities and assessment design.shows how weak curriculum–assessment coherence fuels coaching markets, inequality, and loss of trust in public certification.positions curriculum coherence as both an equity instrument and an economic reform that restores the informational value of credentials.concludes that learning improvement requires altering system signals and reinforcing loops, not adding initiatives on top of incoherent structures.

Chapter 4 set out the learning journey the system must be capable of delivering if learning outcomes are to improve in a sustained way. That journey depends on coherence across stages, clarity about what mastery looks like, and consistency in the signals learners and teachers receive over time. Without these conditions, effort fragments, feedback arrives too late, and learning remains fragile.

Curriculum and assessment are the primary instruments through which this coherence is either created or undermined. They define what counts as learning, how progress is recognised, and which forms of effort are rewarded. In practice, they shape daily classroom behaviour far more powerfully than policy statements or reform rhetoric. When curriculum is overloaded or vague, teachers are forced to interpret rather than enact expectations. When assessment rewards recall rather than understanding, classrooms narrow regardless of stated intentions. When progression is unclear, students move forward without mastering what they need, and the learning journey breaks.

This chapter argues that curriculum is not a neutral technical document. It is the system’s core coordination mechanism. When designed well and reinforced by aligned assessment, it protects instructional time, reduces cognitive overload, and creates shared expectations across classrooms, schools, and regions. When designed poorly, it shifts the burden of coherence onto teachers and families, amplifying inequality and reinforcing risk-averse behaviour.

Assessment is inseparable from this function. Assessment determines which parts of the curriculum are taken seriously, which are ignored, and which are rehearsed mechanically. Together, curriculum and assessment form the learning spine of the system. They are also the most consequential sites of accountability. What is assessed is what is taught. What is taught is what is practised. What is practised becomes the learning experience of students.

• Curriculum as a System Signal, Not a Content Catalogue

In many systems, curriculum is treated as an aspirational catalogue of content rather than a governing signal. New priorities are added in response to social, political, or global pressures, but little is removed. The result is not ambition, but overload. Teachers face impossible coverage expectations. Students encounter breadth without depth. Mastery becomes episodic rather than cumulative.

In Bangladesh, this pattern has weakened coherence across grades. Foundational skills are introduced but not sufficiently protected. Later grades assume competencies that were never securely established. Teachers respond rationally by prioritising examinable content and visible completion rather than deep understanding. This is not a failure of professionalism or commitment. It is a predictable response to unclear and competing system signals.

A coherent curriculum functions as a constraint. It limits what must be taught so that what matters can be taught well. It makes explicit choices about depth over breadth, and about which learning outcomes are non-negotiable. It sequences learning deliberately, ensuring that each stage builds reliably on the last. In doing so, it reduces uncertainty for teachers and lowers the professional risk associated with instructional focus.

This constraint function is central to accountability. A curriculum that tries to cover everything ultimately holds no one accountable for anything. A curriculum that specifies priorities allows supervisors, school leaders, and communities to distinguish between genuine instructional difficulty and weak practice. It creates a shared reference point for improvement rather than a diffuse set of expectations that are impossible to meet simultaneously.

Curriculum coherence also depends on discipline in content selection. Content cannot be treated as an open vessel into which every social, political, or symbolic priority is placed. When content decisions are driven by political economy rather than learning progression, the result is not relevance but fragmentation. Over time, this undermines mastery, overloads classrooms, and weakens the credibility of the curriculum itself.

A learning system must therefore establish a clear principle: curriculum content is determined by what learners need to know and be able to do at each stage, not by what is expedient to include. Social values, national history, and civic priorities matter, but they must be integrated through pedagogically sound sequencing rather than accumulation. Where content expansion is not matched by corresponding reductions elsewhere, curriculum coherence collapses in practice.

Protecting curriculum integrity is not an ideological stance. It is a governance requirement. Without it, teachers are forced to navigate contradictions they did not create, and the system quietly shifts responsibility for coherence onto classrooms and households.

• Learning Progression and the Protection of Foundations

Learning progression is not the same as movement through grades. It is the accumulation of capability over time. For progression to occur, mastery at one stage must be a realistic prerequisite for success at the next.

When progression is poorly specified, assessment substitutes ranking for diagnosis. Students pass without understanding. Teachers move on without confidence. Families invest in private tutoring to manage uncertainty. The system appears active, but learning remains shallow and fragile.

A progression-based curriculum makes depth visible. It defines what students should be able to do with knowledge at key transition points, particularly in literacy, numeracy, and reasoning. It specifies which concepts require sustained practice and which can be revisited flexibly. This clarity allows teachers to slow down without fear of falling behind, and it allows school leaders to protect instructional time for what matters most.

Learning progression only functions when it is treated as a binding system commitment rather than an aspirational principle. If progression is acknowledged in curriculum documents but overridden by assessment pacing, textbook sequencing, or examination calendars, it loses operational force. Teachers are then placed in an impossible position, expected to ensure mastery while also advancing on schedule. Predictably, schedule prevails. Making progression real therefore requires explicit protection of foundational stages, clarity about non-negotiable competencies, and alignment across curriculum, assessment, and instructional time. Without this alignment, progression remains rhetorical, and early learning remains fragile.

Protecting foundations is not a pedagogical preference. It is a system necessity. When early mastery is weak, later interventions become expensive, inequitable, and politically contentious. Upper grades are forced into remediation. Examinations become sorting devices rather than learning signals. Coaching markets expand. Inequality widens.

A coherent learning spine reduces this pressure upstream. It lowers the stakes of later reform by ensuring that later stages are not compensating for earlier failure.

• Assessment as Reinforcement Rather Than Distortion

Assessment translates curriculum intent into behaviour. If assessment signals are misaligned, curriculum collapses in practice regardless of how well it is written.

In Bangladesh, high-stakes examinations reward predictability, memorisation, and coaching. This is not a technical flaw, nor an unintended side effect. It reflects a poorly designed accountability regime that prioritises short-term performance on narrow indicators while failing to verify whether learning has actually occurred.

Under this regime, recall is rewarded but understanding is not tested. Progression is enforced, but mastery is not required. Results are published, but responsibility for their validity is diffuse. Students are judged, teachers are pressured, and schools are ranked, yet no institution is clearly accountable for whether examination outcomes correspond to curriculum goals or real capability.

The result is not disciplined accountability, but its appearance. Actors across the system respond to the strongest visible signal, even when that signal is educationally empty. At the same time, authority over examination design, grading standards, and progression rules remains insulated from meaningful feedback about learning outcomes. Accountability is therefore displaced downward, while control over the signal remains concentrated elsewhere.

This produces both compliance and evasion. Teachers teach to the test because student survival depends on it. Families invest in coaching because they do not trust the signal. Students memorise because depth is punished without predictability. Meanwhile, no actor is held responsible for the widening gap between certified success and actual learning.

Misaligned assessment does more than narrow pedagogy. It distorts the meaning of achievement itself. When assessment rewards recall and predictability, grade inflation becomes structurally likely. Results rise without corresponding gains in understanding, and certificates lose their informational value. This inflation is not evidence of progress. It is evidence that assessment has detached from curriculum mastery.

As signal quality erodes, system-wide consequences follow. Teachers receive affirmation that does not reflect learning. Students progress without secure foundations. Parents interpret success through grades rather than capability. Over time, public confidence in assessment weakens, and informal filtering mechanisms expand to compensate. What appears as success on paper masks a deeper loss of trust in public certification.

Restoring assessment credibility therefore requires more than technical redesign. It requires an explicit commitment that assessment will verify curriculum mastery rather than substitute for it. Without this commitment, accountability remains performative. Actors are judged, but learning is not strengthened.

• Curriculum, Assessment, and the Real Location of Accountability

To understand why these assessment failures persist, it is necessary to examine where accountability actually sits in the system.

In practice, accountability in education systems does not operate primarily through inspection or supervision. It operates through signals. Curriculum communicates what matters. Assessment confirms what will be rewarded. Together, they define which behaviours feel safe, risky, or pointless for actors across the system.

In Bangladesh, these signals pull in different directions. Curriculum documents articulate broad ambitions, but high-stakes examinations reward narrow performance. Teachers are formally accountable for coverage rather than mastery. Schools are judged by pass rates rather than by learning progression. Families, aware of this gap, hedge through private tutoring to manage risk. These responses are not distortions of the system. They are predictable outcomes of how accountability has been structured.

This is why accountability reform cannot be treated as an add-on or an enforcement problem. It is embedded in the architecture of curriculum and assessment. When expectations are diffuse and signals conflict, accountability shifts downward and inward. Teachers absorb responsibility for outcomes they cannot fully control. Students internalise failure without receiving feedback that explains why. Families convert uncertainty into private expenditure. The system appears active and disciplined, but responsibility is fragmented and learning remains brittle.

Accountability failure is intensified by institutional misalignment. Curriculum goals are articulated through one set of bodies, while high-stakes certification, examination design, marking standards, and progression rules are governed through others, with limited enforceable

mechanisms to ensure alignment. In such conditions, assessment inevitably overrides curriculum in practice, regardless of stated intent.

Expecting curriculum reform to succeed under these conditions places an impossible burden on teachers and curriculum designers alike. When examinations contradict curriculum progression, teachers must choose between professional judgment and student survival. Predictably, survival wins. This is not resistance to reform. It is rational compliance with the strongest signal in the system.

Future system design must therefore resolve this misalignment explicitly. Curriculum authority must be reflected in assessment design, timing, and standards. Where this alignment is absent, accountability fragments, grade inflation becomes structurally likely, and learning outcomes remain unstable.

A coherent learning spine relocates accountability back to the system. It clarifies what mastery looks like at each stage. It aligns assessment to progression rather than coverage. It enables supervisors, school leaders, and communities to ask meaningful questions about practice rather than relying on crude outcome proxies. Accountability becomes instructional rather than performative.

This shift matters politically as well as educationally. Systems that rely on fear, surveillance, and blame to enforce compliance exhaust themselves. Systems that embed accountability in shared learning expectations generate legitimacy. They are more resilient precisely because they reduce the need for constant enforcement and allow professional judgment to function.

• From Curriculum Signals to Market Signals

Curriculum and assessment do not stop at the school gate. They shape how young people understand opportunity, risk, and return. Over time, they influence labour markets, credential value, and patterns of investment in human capital.

When learning progression is unclear and assessment rewards short-term recall, credentials lose informational value. Employers respond by discounting certificates and relying on informal screening, networks, or additional testing. Families respond by chasing grades rather than skills. Students respond by prioritising strategies that maximise progression rather than competence. This is the credentialism loop described in Chapter 3, and it is reinforced upstream by weak curriculum–assessment coherence.

A system that does not reliably signal what learners can do cannot support efficient labour market matching. Over time, this erodes trust not only in schools but in public qualifications themselves. The result is a fragmented market in which skills, credentials, and opportunity drift apart.

Curriculum coherence is therefore an economic reform, not just an educational one. When progression is visible and assessment reflects real capability, credentials regain meaning. Employers can trust signals. Students can see the link between effort and opportunity.

Vocational and technical pathways gain legitimacy when they are grounded in demonstrable competence rather than social status.

This is where curriculum connects directly to productivity and growth. A learning system that rewards depth, problem-solving, and application feeds a labour market that values capability. A system that rewards memorisation feeds a labour market that mistrusts formal education and relies on private filtering mechanisms.

• Interrupting Reinforcing Loops That Undermine Learning

Appendix B shows that education systems stabilise around dominant feedback loops. These loops are not restated here as abstract system dynamics, but to show how everyday classroom behaviour, household decisions, and assessment practices stabilise around a small number of reinforcing patterns unless system signals are deliberately changed. This chapter translates that logic into everyday terms.

When curriculum is overloaded, teachers rush. When teachers rush, students memorise. When students memorise, examinations reward recall. When examinations reward recall, coaching markets expand. When coaching markets expand, inequality widens. When inequality widens, trust erodes. When trust erodes, families hedge further. The loop reinforces itself.

Breaking this cycle does not require heroic effort from teachers or moral exhortation to families. It requires altering the conditions under which decisions are made.

A coherent curriculum reduces overload. Reduced overload allows time-on-task to matter. When time-on-task produces mastery, formative feedback becomes useful. When feedback is useful, teachers are more willing to slow down. When slowing down is not punished by assessment, professional judgement strengthens. When professional judgement strengthens, reliance on private tutoring weakens. When reliance weakens, public confidence rises.

These are not abstract dynamics. They are observable behaviours. Systems that have shifted learning outcomes at scale have done so by changing which loops dominate, not by adding initiatives on top of existing structures.

• Curriculum Coherence as an Equity Instrument

Curriculum incoherence does not affect all learners equally. It disproportionately harms those with fewer buffers.

Students from educated households can compensate for weak progression signals. They receive help at home, access private tutoring, and navigate opaque expectations. First-generation learners cannot. For them, unclear progression is not an inconvenience but a structural barrier.

A clear learning spine reduces this inequality. It makes expectations legible. It allows teachers to diagnose rather than guess. It gives students repeated opportunities to experience success. It shifts advantage from background to effort.

This is why foundational learning must be protected institutionally rather than rhetorically. When early mastery is secure, later choices widen. When it is not, systems are forced into late- stage remediation that is expensive, politicised, and rarely equitable.

Curriculum coherence therefore performs a quiet redistributive function. It reduces reliance on informal support systems that favour the already advantaged. It converts public schooling from a sorting mechanism into a capability-building one.

• From Learning Journey to System Design

This chapter has grounded the learning journey described in Chapter 4 in its core system mechanisms. Curriculum defines what learning is. Assessment determines which learning counts. Together, they shape behaviour across classrooms, households, and markets.

They also define the feasible space for reform. Without a coherent learning spine, teachers are asked to compensate for systemic ambiguity. Assessment reform becomes politically risky. Accountability oscillates between neglect and punishment. Enabling systems struggle to stabilise impact.

With coherence, the burden shifts back to institutions rather than individuals. Expectations become explicit. Feedback arrives earlier. Accountability becomes meaningful rather than symbolic. Trust has something concrete to anchor to.

The next chapter turns to teachers on these terms. Teachers are no longer positioned as heroic interpreters of vague ambition or as shock absorbers for systemic incoherence. They are professionals working within a system that has made clear, enforceable choices about what learning it is responsible for delivering, and about how that responsibility will be shared.

Chapter 6. Teachers as Professionals in a Coherent System

This chapter

1. shows how long-standing curriculum overload, assessment volatility, and weak learning enforcement shaped teaching practice toward compliance, coverage, and recall rather than instructional quality.
2. demonstrates that system incoherence both constrained committed teachers and protected weak practice by diffusing responsibility for learning outcomes.
3. explains how curriculum and assessment coherence reorders accountability by clarifying expectations, stabilising signals, and making instructional practice observable rather than ambiguous.
4. examines how professional accountability shifts from procedural compliance to classroom practice once mastery, progression, and assessment alignment are enforced.
5. sets out what professional support must look like under clarity, emphasising classroom-embedded coaching, feedback, and instructional leadership rather than episodic training.
6. identifies the limits of professional development in a system with uneven capability, and explains why remediation, redeployment, and exit pathways become unavoidable once expectations are enforceable.
7. reframes teacher wellbeing as sustainability under coherent expectations, linking workload, administrative burden, supervision, and learning outcomes rather than treating wellbeing as insulation from accountability.
8. concludes that teacher professionalisation depends on system coherence, and that enforcing learning integrity necessarily entails confronting uneven practice rather than accommodating it through ambiguity.

Chapter 5 established curriculum and assessment as the system’s learning spine. It showed that when priorities are explicit, progression is binding, and assessment verifies mastery rather than recall, the system makes a decisive shift from managing appearances to enforcing learning. This shift does not merely improve technical coherence. It fundamentally reorders responsibility, with direct consequences for teachers.

For decades, teaching in Bangladesh took place within systemic ambiguity. Overloaded curricula, contradictory directives, volatile examinations, and unrealistic pacing created conditions in which weak instruction could plausibly be attributed to system failure rather than classroom practice. In that environment, mechanical teaching, rote rehearsal, and coverage- driven instruction were often defensible adaptations to incoherent signals. Teachers operated in a system that rewarded compliance, tolerated low instructional ambition, and rarely verified whether learning had actually occurred.

However, ambiguity did more than constrain committed teachers. It also protected poor practice. Weak selection into teaching, limited screening for aptitude, and low expectations of instructional quality allowed some individuals to enter and remain in the profession precisely because it permitted minimal effort, predictable routines, and time for activities outside the classroom. In a system where learning outcomes were weakly enforced and assessment rewarded recall, such behaviour carried little professional cost. Compliance was sufficient. Instructional quality was optional.

Coherence changes this equilibrium. Once curriculum priorities are narrowed, learning progression is explicit, and assessment verifies mastery, the space for both excuse and evasion contracts. Teachers are no longer navigating noise. Expectations are clearer, instructional time is more defensible, and assessment signals are more stable. Under these conditions, persistent mechanical teaching is no longer a rational adaptation to system incoherence. It is a professional failure.

This chapter therefore does not proceed from a presumption of teacher virtue. It proceeds from a redefinition of accountability under clarity. When the system makes enforceable choices about what learning it is responsible for delivering, it also makes enforceable claims about professional behaviour. Some teachers will thrive under this shift. Others will struggle. Some will resist. That is unavoidable. What matters is that responsibility is no longer displaced onto curriculum documents, examination volatility, or administrative contradiction.

Teachers are no longer positioned as shock absorbers for systemic incoherence or as heroic interpreters of vague ambition. They are positioned as professionals operating within defined expectations, stable signals, and real consequences. With that repositioning comes both protection and obligation. This chapter sets out what the system now guarantees to teachers, what teachers are therefore accountable for, which practices are no longer acceptable once coherence exists, and what professional support must look like in a system that has decided to take learning seriously rather than symbolically.

• Professional Accountability Under Coherence

The reordering of responsibility described above is not abstract. It has concrete implications for how teaching is defined, evaluated, and supported. Once curriculum priorities are narrowed, progression is binding, and assessment verifies mastery, the system makes a set of commitments to teachers. Those commitments, in turn, ground a sharper and more enforceable conception of professional accountability.

What the System Now Guarantees

A coherent system makes specific guarantees to teachers, and these guarantees are not symbolic.

First, it guarantees curriculum clarity. Teachers are no longer asked to cover everything. They are asked to teach what matters, in the order it matters, with sufficient time to secure mastery. Priority replaces accumulation, and depth replaces superficial completion.

Second, it guarantees assessment alignment. Teachers are no longer penalised for slowing down to ensure understanding. Examinations and progression rules reinforce curriculum intent rather than contradict it, removing the long-standing conflict between teaching well and helping students survive the system.

Third, it guarantees realistic instructional scope. Foundational learning is protected, pacing assumptions are defensible, and teachers are not expected to compensate for systemic overload through personal sacrifice, improvisation, or informal workarounds.

Fourth, it reduces noise. Administrative directives, reporting requirements, and reform initiatives are constrained by the learning spine rather than layered indiscriminately on top of

it. Teachers receive fewer, clearer signals about what matters, and those signals are stable over time.

These guarantees matter because they narrow the space of acceptable explanation. Once they exist, persistent weak instruction can no longer be attributed to impossible conditions. The system has created the conditions under which professional judgement can operate. It can now expect that judgement to be exercised.

What Teachers Are Therefore Accountable For

Under coherence, accountability shifts decisively from compliance to practice. Teachers are accountable for instructional quality. This includes how concepts are explained, how understanding is checked, how errors are responded to, and how lesson time is allocated. Teaching is no longer defined by syllabus completion or examination preparation alone, but by whether students are actually learning what the system has deemed essential.

They are accountable for the exercise of professional judgement. Decisions about pacing, differentiation, and when to slow down to secure mastery are no longer optional or deferrable. Once mastery is non-negotiable, judgement becomes a professional obligation rather than a discretionary add-on.

They are accountable for classroom practice. Passive supervision, extended copying, and mechanical rehearsal without feedback are no longer defensible strategies when expectations are realistic and instructional time is protected.

They are accountable for engagement with feedback. When assessment and supervision generate usable information about learning, ignoring that information is no longer neutral. It represents a failure to act on evidence within one’s professional remit.

This is a substantially higher bar than the system has historically enforced. That is deliberate. A system that clarifies its expectations must also accept the consequences of enforcing them.

What Is No Longer Acceptable

Once coherence exists, several practices lose legitimacy. Mechanical coverage is no longer acceptable. Advancing through content without evidence of understanding is not neutral compliance. It is instructional neglect.

Passive compliance is no longer acceptable. Following directives without engaging intellectually with their purpose is incompatible with professional teaching under clarity.

Reliance on coaching markets is no longer acceptable. Teachers cannot outsource instructional responsibility to private tutors while retaining public authority. Coaching markets expanded because assessment signals were untrustworthy. When assessment verifies mastery, that justification disappears.

Avoidance of instructional responsibility is no longer acceptable. Persistent weak learning cannot be attributed solely to student background once foundations are protected and expectations are realistic.

These are not moral judgements about individual teachers. They are structural implications of coherence. A system that does not enforce these boundaries will reproduce the very equilibrium it claims to reject, regardless of how well its curriculum or assessments are written.

• What Professional Support Looks Like Under Clarity

Higher expectations without support would be punitive, but support that is disconnected from instructional responsibility is equally corrosive. Under coherence, professional support must therefore change in both form and purpose. In an incoherent system, support is typically episodic, generic, and symbolic. Workshops substitute for practice, training is delivered away from classrooms, and new ideas are introduced without follow-through. Teachers are left to translate abstract guidance into daily instruction on their own. In such conditions, professional development becomes performative: attendance replaces learning, certification replaces improvement, and very little changes inside classrooms.

A coherent system cannot rely on this model. Once curriculum priorities are explicit and assessment verifies mastery, professional support must move directly into the instructional core. Support shifts from transmission to practice, and from exposure to accountability. Mentoring, observation, and coaching focused on real classrooms become central rather than supplementary. Teachers need structured opportunities to see effective instruction enacted against the actual curriculum they are responsible for teaching, to attempt new approaches with their own students, and to receive feedback grounded in evidence of learning rather than compliance with procedure. This form of support makes instructional quality visible. It also makes avoidance visible. That visibility is not a side effect. It is the point.

Collaboration replaces isolation, but not as an abstract professional value. Professional learning communities organised around curriculum progression, student work, and common assessment tasks create peer accountability that is more credible than external inspection. When teachers examine student errors together, compare instructional choices, and observe one another teaching the same material, weak practice is harder to hide and strong practice is easier to diffuse. Collegiality under clarity is therefore not about comfort or morale alone. It is about shared responsibility for learning outcomes.

School leadership is pivotal in this shift. Under coherence, the role of school leaders is redefined. They are no longer primarily administrators of rules or intermediaries for directives. Their central responsibility becomes instructional leadership: diagnosing teaching practice, prioritising support where learning is weakest, protecting time for professional work, and sustaining a culture in which improvement is expected rather than optional. Leadership that cannot engage with instruction does not remain neutral under these conditions. It becomes a bottleneck rather than a support.

This model of professional support is demanding. It requires time, instructional expertise, and sustained investment. It also requires the system to tolerate visible struggle during transition, as teaching practice is exposed to scrutiny that was previously absent. However, it is the only form of support that is commensurate with the expectations the system has now set. Professional support under clarity is not a substitute for accountability. It is its counterpart. Support exists to enable teachers to meet higher standards, not to excuse their absence. Where support is provided and learning does not improve, the system gains information it previously lacked. That information is essential for distinguishing between teachers who require further development and those who are unwilling or unable to meet professional expectations.

Without this form of support, higher standards collapse into rhetoric. With it, responsibility becomes actionable.

• Selection, Capability, and the Limits of Reform

Curriculum and assessment coherence expose a difficult truth that has long been obscured by system ambiguity. Not all teachers currently in the system will be able to meet the expectations that coherence makes enforceable. This is not a speculative risk. It is an empirical consequence of years of weak selection, uneven preparation, limited screening for instructional aptitude, and an accountability regime that tolerated low instructional ambition as long as procedural compliance was maintained.

This outcome is not the failure of individuals alone. It is the predictable result of a system that prioritised staffing stability, credential fulfilment, and administrative coverage over subject mastery, pedagogical capability, and classroom performance. However, once coherence exists, that history can no longer be used to defer responsibility indefinitely. Exposure creates choice. The system must decide whether it is willing to act on the information coherence generates.

There are only two viable paths. The first is to dilute expectations in order to accommodate current capability. This path preserves surface stability, avoids confrontation, and reassures incumbents, but it reproduces the very equilibrium that Chapter 2 diagnosed. Learning remains optional, credentials continue to drift away from capability, and reform collapses into symbolic adjustment. The second path is to maintain expectations and confront the institutional and political consequences of doing so. This path is difficult. It requires confronting uneven performance, managing resistance, and accepting that not all incumbents will remain in instructional roles. But it is the only path consistent with taking learning seriously.

Professional development has a central role in this transition, but its limits must be acknowledged explicitly. Training and mentoring can raise capability over time where foundational knowledge exists and effort is present. They cannot indefinitely compensate for weak subject mastery, persistent instructional avoidance, or refusal to engage with feedback once expectations are clear and support is available. A system that pretends otherwise merely postpones failure and shifts its cost onto students.

Clear standards therefore require clear pathways. These include structured remediation for teachers with development potential, redeployment to non-instructional roles where appropriate, and exit mechanisms where minimum professional standards cannot be met despite support. These pathways are not punitive instruments. They are governance necessities in a system that claims learning as a non-negotiable outcome rather than a hopeful aspiration.

Once coherence exists, protecting every incumbent becomes incompatible with protecting learning. This is not an argument against teachers. It is an argument against pretending that reform can succeed without confronting selection, capability, and the limits of accommodation. A system that refuses to make these choices will eventually make a different one by default: it will sacrifice learning while preserving appearances.

• Wellbeing as Sustainability Under Professional Expectations

Teacher wellbeing has often been framed as protection from pressure or as a compensatory response to systemic failure. Under coherence, it must be reframed more precisely as

sustainability under real professional expectations. A system that is serious about learning cannot promise comfort, but it must guarantee conditions under which sustained, demanding work is possible.

Wellbeing in this sense is not an emotional abstraction. It rests on concrete institutional conditions: manageable workload, predictable routines, timely salary disbursement, and supervision that is firm but respectful. It requires the deliberate removal of unnecessary administrative burden so that teachers’ cognitive and emotional effort can be directed toward instruction rather than compliance. When reporting, monitoring, and directive overload dominate the working day, stress is not an individual resilience problem. It is a system design failure.

Wellbeing under coherence also requires honesty about the nature of the work. Teaching in a system that enforces mastery is demanding. It requires sustained attention, diagnostic skill, responsiveness to student misunderstanding, and emotional labour in classrooms where failure is no longer hidden by automatic progression. A system that softens this reality in rhetoric while intensifying expectations in practice undermines trust and accelerates burnout.

Sustainable professionalism emerges when effort is meaningfully connected to outcomes. When instructional improvement leads to visible learning gains, when feedback is timely and usable, and when excellence is recognised through practice rather than symbolic praise, professional motivation stabilises. In such conditions, wellbeing is not achieved by lowering expectations, but by ensuring that expectations are coherent, effort is not wasted, and teachers can see that their work matters.

• From Teacher Reform to System Credibility

This chapter has not argued that teachers are the sole lever of reform. It has argued the opposite. Teachers cannot be professionalised in the absence of system coherence, and no amount of exhortation, training, or surveillance can substitute for clear curriculum priorities, aligned assessment, and realistic instructional scope.

Once coherence begins to take hold, however, teacher behaviour becomes central. Instructional responsibility moves closer to classrooms. Avoidance becomes visible. Excellence becomes distinguishable from routine. The system can no longer plausibly attribute weak learning to ambiguity alone.

This shift is uncomfortable. It exposes uneven capability, entrenched habits, and resistance that was previously obscured by incoherence. It also makes clear that professionalisation is not a rhetorical commitment but a practical one, with consequences for selection, support, progression, and exit. A system that is unwilling to confront these implications will inevitably dilute expectations and reproduce the equilibrium described in Chapter 2.

At the same time, this chapter does not assume that the system can move instantly from today’s conditions to full professional accountability. Many teachers will require sustained support to meet higher expectations. Some will improve. Some will struggle. Some will not adapt. That transition must be managed deliberately rather than denied. The National Learning Implementation Framework, which accompanies this document, sets out the sequencing, safeguards, and institutional mechanisms required to move from clarity on paper to capability in practice, without either retreating from standards or imposing them prematurely.

Professional judgement, in this sense, is not assumed to be uniformly present today. It is learned, exercised, and verified over time under conditions of clarity. Coherence does not presuppose a fully capable workforce on day one. It creates the conditions under which capability can be developed, observed, and distinguished from avoidance. Without those conditions, judgement cannot be meaningfully assessed at all. With them, it becomes possible to invest in development where potential exists and to act decisively where it does not.

What is not optional is direction. The system must be explicit about where it is heading, what professionalism will mean once coherence is established, and which practices will ultimately no longer be tolerated. Phasing is a strategy for change, not a justification for delay.

The next chapter turns to enabling systems. It asks whether governance, resourcing, and institutional design are capable of sustaining this transition over time, or whether political pressure, administrative inertia, and vested interests will force a retreat back into ambiguity. The credibility of the entire reform agenda rests on that choice.

Chapter 7. Enabling Systems and the Politics of Sustaining Coherence

This chaptershows how coherence shifts responsibility upward from classrooms to the institutions that govern, certify, finance, and defend the education systemexplains why coherence generates conflict rather than harmony by exposing deferred decisions and institutional contradictions once learning outcomes become visibledemonstrates how governance structures built for administration struggle when required to enforce alignment and arbitrate instructional standardsanalyses how weak sideways enforcement allows institutions to absorb pressure through delay, parallel interpretation, and exception-makingshows how career systems become the primary site where enforcement either gains consequence or collapses into dilution once performance is differentiatedexamines how finance and verification systems can stabilise retreat by prioritising paperwork compliance over instructional consequenceexplains why data systems fail when information circulates without feedback loops that trigger correction, support, or sanctionconcludes that system credibility is tested at the point of political pressure, and that sustaining coherence depends on institutions choosing enforcement over retreat into ambiguityThis chaptershows how coherence shifts responsibility upward from classrooms to the institutions that govern, certify, finance, and defend the education systemexplains why coherence generates conflict rather than harmony by exposing deferred decisions and institutional contradictions once learning outcomes become visibledemonstrates how governance structures built for administration struggle when required to enforce alignment and arbitrate instructional standardsanalyses how weak sideways enforcement allows institutions to absorb pressure through delay, parallel interpretation, and exception-makingshows how career systems become the primary site where enforcement either gains consequence or collapses into dilution once performance is differentiatedexamines how finance and verification systems can stabilise retreat by prioritising paperwork compliance over instructional consequenceexplains why data systems fail when information circulates without feedback loops that trigger correction, support, or sanctionconcludes that system credibility is tested at the point of political pressure, and that sustaining coherence depends on institutions choosing enforcement over retreat into ambiguity This chaptershows how coherence shifts responsibility upward from classrooms to the institutions that govern, certify, finance, and defend the education systemexplains why coherence generates conflict rather than harmony by exposing deferred decisions and institutional contradictions once learning outcomes become visibledemonstrates how governance structures built for administration struggle when required to enforce alignment and arbitrate instructional standardsanalyses how weak sideways enforcement allows institutions to absorb pressure through delay, parallel interpretation, and exception-makingshows how career systems become the primary site where enforcement either gains consequence or collapses into dilution once performance is differentiatedexamines how finance and verification systems can stabilise retreat by prioritising paperwork compliance over instructional consequenceexplains why data systems fail when information circulates without feedback loops that trigger correction, support, or sanctionconcludes that system credibility is tested at the point of political pressure, and that sustaining coherence depends on institutions choosing enforcement over retreat into ambiguityThis chaptershows how coherence shifts responsibility upward from classrooms to the institutions that govern, certify, finance, and defend the education systemexplains why coherence generates conflict rather than harmony by exposing deferred decisions and institutional contradictions once learning outcomes become visibledemonstrates how governance structures built for administration struggle when required to enforce alignment and arbitrate instructional standardsanalyses how weak sideways enforcement allows institutions to absorb pressure through delay, parallel interpretation, and exception-makingshows how career systems become the primary site where enforcement either gains consequence or collapses into dilution once performance is differentiatedexamines how finance and verification systems can stabilise retreat by prioritising paperwork compliance over instructional consequenceexplains why data systems fail when information circulates without feedback loops that trigger correction, support, or sanctionconcludes that system credibility is tested at the point of political pressure, and that sustaining coherence depends on institutions choosing enforcement over retreat into ambiguity

Chapters 5 and 6 established what coherence requires. Curriculum priorities must be explicit, assessment must verify mastery, and teachers must be held professionally accountable under clear and enforceable expectations. Together, these shifts move the system away from managing appearances and toward enforcing learning as a concrete outcome rather than a symbolic aspiration.

Once this happens, the weakest link in the system changes. Under ambiguity, weak learning could be absorbed at the classroom level. Overloaded curricula, volatile examinations, and contradictory directives provided plausible explanations for failure, allowing responsibility to float across actors and institutions. Enforcement never fully arrived, and institutional arrangements remained intact even as learning deteriorated.

Under coherence, responsibility moves upward. When curriculum is narrowed, assessment aligned, and instructional expectations clarified, weak learning is no longer plausibly explained by design failure alone. It becomes visible as an enforcement problem. Pressure shifts away from teachers and toward the institutions that govern, certify, finance, monitor, and defend the system.

This is where reform has historically broken. Coherence does not create harmony. It creates conflict. It forces decisions that were previously deferred, exposes contradictions between mandates, and makes retreat politically tempting. The critical moment arrives when mastery- verified assessment produces its first visible shock, for example when examination results no longer match the familiar story of steady improvement and high pass rates, and when previously hidden variation in performance becomes publicly legible.

This chapter examines whether Bangladesh’s enabling systems are capable of sustaining coherence once that shock arrives, or whether they will absorb pressure by softening standards, carving exceptions, and allowing ambiguity to re-enter through institutional practice. The test is not technical readiness, but credibility under pressure.

• Governance Under Coherence: From Administration to Enforcement

Education governance in Bangladesh has been built to administer scale rather than to enforce learning integrity. Its core functions are distribution, staffing, reporting, approvals, and compliance monitoring. These functions are indispensable in a large and complex system, but they were never designed to arbitrate instructional standards or to resolve conflicts over what counts as mastery once expectations harden.

Coherence changes the role governance must play. Once curriculum priorities are explicit and assessment verifies mastery, governance can no longer operate primarily as a transmission mechanism. Someone must decide whose interpretation holds, what constitutes acceptable performance, and what happens when outcomes contradict stated intent. Governance shifts from administration to arbitration, from passing information upward to enforcing alignment across institutions.

This shift exposes the system’s weakness in sideways enforcement. Curriculum signals are set by the National Curriculum and Textbook Board. Certification authority sits with the Boards of Intermediate and Secondary Education and the Bangladesh Madrasah Education Board. Delivery and supervision operate through parallel chains in the Directorate of Secondary and Higher Education and the Directorate of Primary Education. BANBEIS renders the system increasingly visible through data, while inspection and audit functions focus primarily on procedural and financial compliance. Each institution has a defined mandate, but no routine mechanism compels alignment when mandates collide.

Under ambiguity, this architecture is stable. NCTB can narrow curricula without controlling how assessments interpret them. Boards can certify outcomes that reward recall rather than mastery. DSHE and DPE can supervise attendance and coverage without engaging instructional quality. BANBEIS can document learning gaps without triggering corrective action. Inspection mechanisms can verify files and expenditure while classrooms stagnate. Responsibility is vertically strong but horizontally hollow.

Under coherence, this arrangement becomes unstable. Once assessment aligns with curriculum and instructional expectations harden, contradictions between institutions can no longer be absorbed quietly. Governance must enforce sideways, not just upward. It must compel alignment between curriculum intent and certification practice, between supervision routines and instructional quality, and between data visibility and corrective authority.

When governance lacks the authority, routines, or political backing to do this, enforcement stalls at institutional boundaries. Disputes are resolved through delay, parallel interpretation, or escalation rather than through instructional standard-setting. What previously appeared as coordination problems become enforcement failures. Governance built for administration begins to fracture when asked to defend learning integrity.

When sideways enforcement fails, responsibility is displaced downward. Schools face pressure from parents and communities, but without authority to change curriculum, assessment, or

staffing. Informal community scrutiny intensifies unevenly, reproducing the weak and unequal horizontal accountability patterns described in Appendix A. These pressures do not correct system misalignment; they stabilise it by shifting risk onto households.

• Incentives, Careers, and the Persistence of Low Stakes

Under coherence, the system must differentiate between effort, capability, and avoidance. Once mastery is verified and instructional outcomes become visible, uniform treatment of performance is no longer neutral. It becomes an active choice to absorb pressure rather than to act on it.

Career systems are where this differentiation either acquires consequence or collapses. Postings, transfers, and promotions determine whether visible performance matters. If instructional outcomes do not shape careers, enforcement stalls regardless of how clear expectations become elsewhere in the system.

Under conditions of ambiguity, insulation was stabilising. When learning outcomes were weakly verified and instructional quality was difficult to observe, seniority-based and compliance-based career structures reduced conflict and protected institutional equilibrium. They allowed the system to function without constant confrontation over performance or capability.

Coherence alters this settlement. If mastery is verified, then career systems that cannot respond become the primary site where enforcement fails. Visible variation in instructional quality demands decisions about support, remediation, redeployment, and exit. These decisions are not primarily pedagogical. They are political, because they disrupt long-standing protections and expose uneven capability that was previously concealed by ambiguity.

The predictable response is not open resistance, but dilution. Expectations are reframed as aspirational. Performance signals are treated as provisional. Enforcement is delayed in the name of transition. Over time, low stakes reassert themselves even as reform language remains intact and coherence is preserved rhetorically.

The system therefore faces a structural choice. It can absorb pressure by softening standards so that careers remain insulated, or it can absorb conflict by changing incentives so that performance differentiation has consequence. Coherence cannot survive if career systems continue to function as shock absorbers once outcomes become visible.

• Finance, Verification, and Money Without Consequence

Finance does not merely fund education. It signals what the system values. What gets verified gets done. What gets audited gets performed. What is measured on paper becomes the target of effort.

Bangladesh’s education financing system evolved under ambiguity. Budgets are rigid and salary-heavy, verification prioritises paperwork, and links between expenditure and instructional outcomes are weak. In this environment, effort concentrates on producing compliant documentation rather than verifiable learning, and discretionary space is preserved within delivery chains.

Under ambiguity, this arrangement is politically manageable. Increased spending can be presented as commitment, while weak learning outcomes are attributed to scale, poverty, or disruption. Finance performs a symbolic function, demonstrating effort without demanding proof of instructional impact.

Coherence changes the meaning of money. When learning expectations are explicit and assessment verifies mastery, the gap between expenditure and outcomes becomes visible. Budget flows that do not translate into improved instruction attract scrutiny. Verification practices that focus on files rather than classrooms become politically exposed.

The retreat mechanism is predictable. Paperwork compliance intensifies. Inspection and audit activity increase around inputs. Classroom-level verification remains thin. Outcome proxies replace mastery as the object of attention. Hard verification is delayed or displaced to protect discretionary space. These moves stabilise institutions, but they weaken coherence.

Finance can sustain reform only when verification follows learning rather than paperwork, and when expenditure is treated not as proof of effort but as a claim that must be justified by instructional effect. Without this shift, additional resources risk reinforcing compliance intensity while leaving learning unchanged.

• Information, Feedback, and the Limits of Data

Bangladesh’s education system is increasingly legible upward. BANBEIS and the directorate systems generate extensive information on enrolment, staffing, infrastructure, attendance, and performance, and reporting routines are well established. Administrative visibility has expanded steadily.

The constraint lies in what information does once it circulates. Reporting is reliable. Feedback with consequence is not. Data move efficiently to higher levels of the system, but they rarely return to schools or institutions in forms that trigger correction, support, or sanction. Information accumulation substitutes for action.

This produces reporting loops rather than feedback loops. Under ambiguity, such loops are sufficient. Weak outcomes can be documented without forcing institutional response, and responsibility remains diffuse. The system appears active while behaviour remains unchanged.

Under coherence, information takes on a different role. When assessment verifies mastery and curriculum priorities are explicit, data no longer merely describe patterns. They allocate responsibility. Variation in outcomes becomes evidence of enforcement gaps rather than system noise.

It is at this point that retreat mechanisms activate. Institutions manage implications through timing, framing, indicator choice, and narrative adjustment. Data releases are delayed, comparisons softened, and trends reframed as transitional. Reporting continues, but the capacity of information to change behaviour weakens.

Appendix B explains why feedback loops matter for system behaviour. This chapter shows why they are most fragile when coherence makes performance visible and follow-through costly. Data do not threaten institutions because they are incomplete. They threaten institutions because they demand decisions.

• Managing Resistance: Politics, Media, and Public Narrative

Coherence does not fail quietly. It provokes resistance because it removes buffers that previously absorbed blame. When assessment begins to verify mastery and instructional expectations harden, long-standing accommodations come under threat.

Assessment reform is often the first flashpoint because certification is where visibility concentrates. When boards adjust marking or grading standards, public narratives quickly form around standards falling or fairness being undermined. Media translate uncertainty into decline. Coaching markets mobilise parental anxiety by presenting reform as risk. Unions resist enforcement perceived as uneven or premature. Local political actors intervene to protect incumbents through postings and transfers.

These responses are not aberrations. They are structural reactions to exposure. Coherence makes outcomes legible and allocates responsibility, raising the political cost of enforcement.

Reforms rarely collapse because their logic is flawed. They retreat because pressure arrives before institutions have committed to bearing the cost of enforcement. Narrative softening becomes the first line of defence. Language shifts from mastery to progress, from standards to flexibility, from enforcement to transition. Exceptions are introduced. Pilots proliferate. Over time, standards blur without ever being formally abandoned.

When institutions retreat, enforcement is displaced downward. Households intensify risk management through private tutoring and coaching. Communities exert uneven pressure on schools without authority to change system signals. The informal horizontal accountability patterns described in Appendix A reassert themselves, not as a solution, but as a symptom of state retreat.

Systems that fail to anticipate this dynamic often misinterpret backlash as evidence of reform error rather than as evidence that reform has begun to work. Retreat then occurs precisely when credibility is being tested.

• Phasing Without Retreat: The Role of the National Learning Implementation Framework

Sequencing is necessary in any system-wide reform, but dilution is fatal. The distinction between the two is not technical. It is political, and it determines whether coherence is sustained or quietly undone.

Phasing exists to manage capacity, not to abandon standards. Phased enforcement means fixed direction, time-bound support, and staged verification. Abandonment takes the language of readiness, stability, or consensus and uses it to justify indefinite postponement. The difference lies not in pace, but in commitment.

The National Learning Implementation Framework plays a critical role in holding this line. Its function is not to operate as a technical checklist or a menu of optional reforms. It operates as a political buffer. By sequencing actions while keeping non-negotiables fixed, it protects coherence from the pressures that arise once enforcement begins to bite.

For phasing to serve this purpose, it must be explicit. The system must be clear about what will change, over what period, and what practices will ultimately no longer be tolerated once transition periods end. Without this clarity, sequencing becomes indistinguishable from retreat.

Phasing, properly understood, is a strategy for sustaining direction under pressure. Used otherwise, it becomes the mechanism through which coherence is lost while reform appears to continue.

• What Failure Would Look Like

Failure rarely announces itself directly. It emerges through a series of moves that appear reasonable in isolation but are corrosive in combination. Exceptions are introduced in the name of pragmatism. Delays are framed as prudence. Pilot programmes proliferate without clear pathways to scale. Public narratives soften expectations while formal standards remain unchanged on paper.

Under these conditions, curriculum ambition is preserved rhetorically but not enforced in practice. Assessment alignment is postponed rather than rejected. Teacher accountability is discussed repeatedly but acted on selectively. Data continue to circulate, but without consequence.

Failure has recognisable signatures. Standards remain in circulars, but boards calibrate marking to restore pass rates. Supervision returns to checklist compliance. Data publication becomes less comparable over time. Responsibility is displaced downward, and households compensate for uncertainty through private expenditure.

The system continues to claim reform, but ambiguity re-enters through interpretation, discretion, and delay. What appears as flexibility becomes drift. What is described as caution functions as retreat.

Making this pattern visible before it unfolds is one of the central purposes of this chapter. Systems rarely fail because they lack intelligence or effort. They fail because the mechanisms of retreat are familiar, politically comfortable, and poorly named.

• System Credibility as the Final Test

Bangladesh does not lack plans. It lacks credibility at the point where reform becomes costly. Credibility is not tested at launch. It is tested the first time examination results stop matching the old story. It is tested when mastery-verified assessment produces a distributional shift, when headlines turn hostile, and when insiders demand exceptions.

If assessment returns to being a performance signal rather than a mastery signal, the learning spine collapses. Coherence unravels not because it was wrong, but because it was not defended.

At that moment, leadership faces a choice. It can absorb pressure, defend coherence, and accept instability as the price of enforcement. Or it can retreat into ambiguity, soften expectations, and preserve short-term stability at the expense of learning.

Chapters 5 and 6 showed what coherence requires. This chapter has shown what it costs. The credibility of the reform agenda rests on whether institutions are willing to bear that cost. There is no neutral path. Only a choice.

Chapter 8 Implementation Logic and the Non-Negotiables

This chapterReframes implementation as a set of governing rules rather than a delivery plan, sequencing manual, or programme portfolio.Shows how reforms commonly fail through accumulation, exception, and delay rather than explicit reversal.Defines a set of non-negotiable system conditions that must hold if coherence is to survive enforcement pressure.Demonstrates how weakening any single non-negotiable triggers retreat across curriculum, assessment, professional accountability, and governance.Distinguishes phasing that builds capability under fixed commitments from phasing that functions as dilution of standards.Explains why initiative layering fragments signals, erodes instructional time, and weakens enforcement even when individual programmes are well designed.Establishes the required order of operations between expectations, support, and enforcement to preserve legitimacy.Clarifies the role of the National Learning Implementation Framework as a sequencing instrument that protects direction rather than reopens settled principles.Identifies which system decisions cannot be revisited once enforcement begins without reintroducing ambiguity.Concludes that implementation is ultimately a credibility test, determined by whether institutions defend non-negotiables when political pressure intensifies.This chapterReframes implementation as a set of governing rules rather than a delivery plan, sequencing manual, or programme portfolio.Shows how reforms commonly fail through accumulation, exception, and delay rather than explicit reversal.Defines a set of non-negotiable system conditions that must hold if coherence is to survive enforcement pressure.Demonstrates how weakening any single non-negotiable triggers retreat across curriculum, assessment, professional accountability, and governance.Distinguishes phasing that builds capability under fixed commitments from phasing that functions as dilution of standards.Explains why initiative layering fragments signals, erodes instructional time, and weakens enforcement even when individual programmes are well designed.Establishes the required order of operations between expectations, support, and enforcement to preserve legitimacy.Clarifies the role of the National Learning Implementation Framework as a sequencing instrument that protects direction rather than reopens settled principles.Identifies which system decisions cannot be revisited once enforcement begins without reintroducing ambiguity.Concludes that implementation is ultimately a credibility test, determined by whether institutions defend non-negotiables when political pressure intensifies. This chapterReframes implementation as a set of governing rules rather than a delivery plan, sequencing manual, or programme portfolio.Shows how reforms commonly fail through accumulation, exception, and delay rather than explicit reversal.Defines a set of non-negotiable system conditions that must hold if coherence is to survive enforcement pressure.Demonstrates how weakening any single non-negotiable triggers retreat across curriculum, assessment, professional accountability, and governance.Distinguishes phasing that builds capability under fixed commitments from phasing that functions as dilution of standards.Explains why initiative layering fragments signals, erodes instructional time, and weakens enforcement even when individual programmes are well designed.Establishes the required order of operations between expectations, support, and enforcement to preserve legitimacy.Clarifies the role of the National Learning Implementation Framework as a sequencing instrument that protects direction rather than reopens settled principles.Identifies which system decisions cannot be revisited once enforcement begins without reintroducing ambiguity.Concludes that implementation is ultimately a credibility test, determined by whether institutions defend non-negotiables when political pressure intensifies.This chapterReframes implementation as a set of governing rules rather than a delivery plan, sequencing manual, or programme portfolio.Shows how reforms commonly fail through accumulation, exception, and delay rather than explicit reversal.Defines a set of non-negotiable system conditions that must hold if coherence is to survive enforcement pressure.Demonstrates how weakening any single non-negotiable triggers retreat across curriculum, assessment, professional accountability, and governance.Distinguishes phasing that builds capability under fixed commitments from phasing that functions as dilution of standards.Explains why initiative layering fragments signals, erodes instructional time, and weakens enforcement even when individual programmes are well designed.Establishes the required order of operations between expectations, support, and enforcement to preserve legitimacy.Clarifies the role of the National Learning Implementation Framework as a sequencing instrument that protects direction rather than reopens settled principles.Identifies which system decisions cannot be revisited once enforcement begins without reintroducing ambiguity.Concludes that implementation is ultimately a credibility test, determined by whether institutions defend non-negotiables when political pressure intensifies.

Chapters 5, 6, and 7 established what coherence requires, what it demands of professionals, and why it becomes politically difficult to sustain once enforcement begins and produces visible disruption. Together, they show that the primary risk to reform is not technical failure, but retreat under pressure. Implementation logic therefore cannot be treated as a sequencing plan or a delivery manual. It must operate as a set of governing rules that protect coherence when enforcement becomes uncomfortable. Non-negotiables constrain direction, not methods; they define what must be preserved when trade-offs are demanded, not how change must be delivered.

In systems that fail to sustain reform, implementation often comes to be treated as a portfolio of programmes. Initiatives are launched, pilots proliferate, and activity is mistaken for progress. When pressure arrives from results, media scrutiny, or internal resistance, programmes can be paused, reframed, or quietly absorbed without any formal decision to abandon reform. Coherence dissolves not through explicit reversal, but instead through accumulation, exception, and delay.

This chapter sets out a different approach. Implementation logic here is not about what to do next, but about what must not be undone once enforcement begins to bite. It defines the non- negotiables that anchor the reform agenda, specifies what phasing is allowed to mean, and establishes discipline over how change is introduced. Its purpose is to ensure that sequencing strengthens coherence rather than reopening settled questions when pressure intensifies.

This chapter does not describe delivery steps, allocate responsibilities, or restate the National Learning Implementation Framework. It provides the constitutional logic within which all implementation must operate. Without this logic, even well-designed reforms revert to symbolic compliance once enforcement becomes costly.

• From Reform Activity to Governing Rules

Reform fails when implementation is treated as additive. New priorities are layered onto existing routines, additional reporting is introduced alongside old requirements, and institutions are asked to do more without stopping anything. In such environments, coherence is structurally impossible. The system becomes busier rather than clearer, and enforcement weakens rather than strengthens.

A coherent system therefore requires governing rules that constrain action. These rules determine what takes priority, what must align, and what cannot be traded away when pressure arrives. They are not programme guidelines or implementation preferences. They are system- level constraints that apply regardless of which initiatives are active, funded, or politically salient at any given moment.

These governing rules matter most where authority is distributed across institutions rather than concentrated within a single delivery chain. In such systems, coherence depends not only on vertical compliance within agencies, but on sideways enforcement across curriculum, assessment, supervision, and verification functions. Without rules that bind these functions together, institutional boundaries become sites where enforcement stalls and ambiguity re- enters.

Implementation logic therefore functions as a filter rather than a plan. It distinguishes actions that are permissible because they reinforce the learning spine from actions that are impermissible because they fragment signals, overload classrooms, or dilute accountability. This logic does not replace planning or sequencing. It disciplines them by setting limits on what can be done without undermining coherence.

The purpose of naming non-negotiables is not rigidity for its own sake. It is to prevent the re- entry of ambiguity through well-intentioned accommodation. When non-negotiables are absent, every difficulty becomes an opportunity to reopen foundational decisions. When they are explicit, difficulty is managed within constraints rather than resolved through retreat

• The Non-Negotiables of Coherence

Five non-negotiables anchor the reform agenda. They are not programme components, implementation priorities, or thematic commitments. They are system conditions that must hold if coherence is to survive enforcement. If any one of them is weakened, coherence collapses regardless of how much activity continues elsewhere in the system.

The first non-negotiable is the integrity of the learning spine. Curriculum priorities, learning progression, instructional time, and language of instruction must remain aligned and mutually reinforcing. Foundational learning cannot be compressed or bypassed to accommodate coverage pressures, examination calendars, or political demands without undermining the reform logic as a whole. Once mastery is defined as a requirement rather than an aspiration, progression without learning ceases to be acceptable. Any implementation choice

that compromises the learning spine, even temporarily or for pragmatic reasons, reintroduces ambiguity that later stages of reform cannot correct. Where curriculum progression assumes mastery through a particular language, instruction must be aligned to that assumption rather than left to informal accommodation, as misalignment at this level displaces risk onto households and fragments the spine itself.

The second non-negotiable is assessment credibility. Assessment must verify mastery rather than simulate progress. This requirement applies not only to examination design, but also to marking standards, grading practices, and progression rules. When assessment is adjusted to restore familiar distributions or protect short-term stability, it ceases to function as a learning signal and reverts to a performance signal. At that point, the learning spine collapses, because classrooms, households, and labour markets respond to what is rewarded rather than what is intended. Restoring pass rates through marking adjustment after an initial dip may stabilise headlines, but it directly violates assessment credibility, even when framed as transitional or protective.

Assessment credibility applies uniformly across streams and boards. General, technical, and Madrasah streams are subject to the same mastery standards where learning objectives are equivalent. Separate certification pathways cannot be used to soften expectations, recalibrate difficulty, or manage political discomfort through differentiated grading norms. Stream differentiation cannot operate as a parallel route for absorbing enforcement pressure. Once assessment credibility diverges across boards, the learning spine fragments and household risk management intensifies.

The third non-negotiable is protected instructional time. Instructional time is the scarcest resource in the system and must be defended institutionally rather than left to individual discretion. Administrative directives, reporting requirements, and parallel initiatives cannot be permitted to erode classroom time, particularly in foundational stages. When instructional time is treated as flexible or residual, teachers are pushed back toward coverage, rehearsal, and examination preparation strategies that coherence was explicitly designed to displace.

The fourth non-negotiable is minimum professional standards. Once expectations are explicit and appropriate support is available, persistent instructional avoidance cannot be normalised or absorbed. Professional standards must be enforceable rather than symbolic. This does not imply uniform punishment or immediate sanction, but it does require that development, remediation, redeployment, and exit remain available and credible responses. A system that protects every incumbent regardless of performance ultimately sacrifices learning in order to preserve institutional comfort and stability.

The fifth non-negotiable is governance enforceability across institutional boundaries. Once coherence is established, learning standards must be enforceable not only within classrooms, but across the institutions that set curriculum, certify outcomes, supervise delivery, and render performance visible. Curriculum intent cannot be diluted at the point of assessment. Assessment standards cannot be disconnected from instructional expectations. Data visibility cannot exist without consequence.

Arbitration authority is therefore non-negotiable. Where curriculum intent, assessment standards, supervision findings, or performance data conflict, there must be a recognised locus of arbitration whose determinations are binding across institutions. Without this, sideways enforcement collapses into parallel interpretation at precisely the moment coherence begins to

bite. This Vision does not prescribe a new delivery agency. It requires a standing arbitration function mandated to issue published alignment rulings when contradictions arise between curriculum authorities, certification bodies, delivery directorates, and data systems. These rulings must be authoritative, transparent, and enforceable across institutional boundaries.

In the absence of such an arbiter, contradictions are resolved informally through delay, political escalation, or silent recalibration. Assessment bodies soften standards, supervision retreats to procedural compliance, and curriculum intent is diluted without formal decision. Naming the arbitration function closes this retreat path by making alignment decisions explicit, contestable, and binding. It is not an additional layer of governance, but the mechanism through which existing mandates are made coherent under pressure.

These non-negotiables are interdependent. Weakening any one of them places pressure on the others and accelerates retreat through reinterpretation rather than formal reversal. Protecting all five simultaneously is therefore not optional. It is the minimum condition for coherence to survive its first serious test under political and institutional pressure.

• What Phasing Is Allowed to Mean

Phasing is necessary in a system of this scale, but it is also the most common vehicle for retreat. The distinction between sequencing and dilution is therefore not a matter of timing alone. It is a matter of leverage: which parts of the system are allowed to move first, which signals must remain fixed, and where pressure is absorbed when enforcement begins.

Phased enforcement means that direction is fixed while capability catches up. Core signals remain stable, while routines, support, and verification are introduced progressively. Expectations do not soften as capacity lags. Instead, the system concentrates effort on a small number of leverage points that anchor behaviour while other elements adjust around them. Timelines are explicit, transition periods are bounded, and the end state is not negotiable, even if the path to it is staged.

The critical leverage points are not evenly distributed. Curriculum priorities, assessment standards, and progression rules must stabilise early, because they shape classroom behaviour, household expectations, and market responses. Supervision practices, professional support, and enforcement intensity can then be phased in behind those fixed signals. When phasing respects this order, it builds capability without reopening settled principles. When it does not, ambiguity re-enters through interpretation rather than policy reversal.

Retreat, by contrast, uses the language of phasing to move the wrong levers. Instead of staging support and verification, it relaxes the signals that discipline behaviour. Timelines become elastic. Standards are reframed as provisional. Assessment is recalibrated to manage discomfort. Verification is postponed indefinitely. What was initially described as a transition quietly becomes a permanent exception, and coherence erodes not because it was rejected, but because it was never defended at the points of highest leverage.

Implementation logic must therefore specify not only when phasing occurs, but what phasing cannot touch. Phasing cannot be used to restore progression without mastery. It cannot be used to recalibrate assessment to preserve familiar pass-rate distributions. It cannot be used to defer minimum professional standards indefinitely once expectations and support are in place. It cannot be used to reintroduce initiative layering that fragments instructional focus and weakens accountability.

Phasing is a strategy for managing change under fixed commitments, not a licence to renegotiate the reform itself. When this distinction is enforced, sequencing concentrates pressure where it builds capability. When it is not, sequencing becomes the mechanism through which pressure is dissipated, and retreat occurs under the appearance of pragmatism.

• Initiative Discipline and the Refusal of Layering

One of the most reliable ways coherence collapses is through initiative accumulation. New programmes are introduced to address visible problems, but existing routines remain untouched. Teachers and school leaders are asked to comply with multiple, partially overlapping expectations, and instructional focus fragments as actors hedge across competing signals. What appears as responsiveness functions as dilution.

Layering is not neutral. Each additional initiative competes for instructional time, reporting attention, and administrative compliance. When priorities multiply, enforcement weakens because no single signal can dominate behaviour. Actors respond rationally by doing a little of everything and committing fully to nothing. Coherence is lost not through resistance, but through overload.

Coherence therefore requires initiative discipline as a governing rule rather than a preference. This means fewer reforms, tighter routines, and explicit decisions about what stops when something new starts. It also requires resisting the temptation to treat every emerging problem as evidence that another programme is needed. Many implementation problems arise not because activity is insufficient, but because signals are unclear, contradictory, or weakly enforced.

The leverage point here is substitution, not addition. Any new action must replace something existing, not sit alongside it. When substitution is avoided, initiatives accumulate while enforcement dissipates. When substitution is enforced, the system becomes clearer even as activity narrows.

Initiative discipline applies equally to externally financed and technically assisted programmes. Development partners, consultants, and pilot-driven interventions have historically contributed to layering, parallel reporting systems, and fragmented accountability without strengthening learning enforcement. Under this Vision, external support is not exempt from coherence constraints. Financing, technical assistance, and innovation are acceptable only insofar as they reinforce the learning spine, assessment credibility, instructional time, and professional standards, rather than reopening settled questions through parallel agendas or exceptional arrangements.

Implementation logic must therefore impose a presumption against layering. Any proposed initiative must demonstrate how it strengthens the learning spine, how it aligns with assessment and protected instructional time, and which existing requirements it replaces or renders unnecessary. Initiatives that add reporting, monitoring, or instructional demands without displacing existing obligations weaken coherence regardless of their individual merits.

This discipline is politically difficult because it requires saying no to plausible, well-intentioned proposals. It requires refusing activity that signals responsiveness in favour of routines that sustain enforcement. Without this refusal, coherence becomes one initiative among many rather

than the organising principle of the system, and retreat occurs through accumulation rather than reversal.

• Enforcement, Support, and the Order of Operations

A common failure mode in reform is the inversion of enforcement and support. Expectations are raised rhetorically, but support remains generic, episodic, or disconnected from classroom practice. When learning outcomes do not improve, enforcement is either intensified prematurely or abandoned altogether, producing cycles of pressure and retreat that undermine legitimacy.

Under coherence, the order of operations is not procedural detail. It is a condition of credibility. Expectations must be explicit before support can be targeted. Support must be available before enforcement is applied. Enforcement must follow evidence that expectations were clear and that meaningful support was provided. When this sequence is reversed, accountability appears arbitrary rather than principled, and resistance hardens even where reform intent is sound.

Implementation logic must therefore bind enforcement to conditions rather than to timelines alone. Where curriculum priorities are clear, assessment verifies mastery, and instructional support has been provided, enforcement is not punitive. It is a system obligation. Where clarity or support is absent, enforcement is not merely ineffective. It is illegitimate, because it shifts responsibility downward while ambiguity remains intact upstream.

The non-negotiables do not require immediate or uniform enforcement across the system. They require that enforcement remains credible and unavoidable over time. Credibility means that enforcement is known to be possible, not that it is constantly applied. Once enforcement is removed from the set of available responses, coherence becomes symbolic. Expectations may still be articulated, but they no longer carry consequence.

These non-negotiables are therefore not internal management preferences. They are public commitments intended to anchor scrutiny across institutions, professions, media, and society. Their function is to make retreat visible when pressure arrives, not to rely on discretion or goodwill. By naming what cannot be traded away, the Vision creates reference points against which future decisions can be judged, including decisions taken by leadership itself.

• The Role of NLIF Within the Constitutional Logic

The National Learning Implementation Framework operates within this implementation logic. It does not define the non-negotiables, nor does it replace them. Its role is to sequence action while holding direction steady under pressure.

NLIF provides a structured path from clarity on paper to capability in practice. It sets out how routines are built, how professional support is phased, and how verification is introduced without overwhelming delivery institutions. In this sense, NLIF addresses capacity. It does not address commitment. That distinction is critical.

NLIF cannot compensate for retreat at the level of principle. If learning spine integrity is compromised, if assessment credibility is softened, or if enforcement is indefinitely postponed, no amount of sequencing can restore coherence. Sequencing can manage transition, but it cannot repair abandonment.

For this reason, NLIF should be read as a mechanism of protection rather than as a menu of options. Its authority derives from the non-negotiables, not the other way around. When pressure arrives, NLIF should be used to defend direction by managing how change unfolds, not to justify delay by reopening what has already been settled.

• What Cannot Be Reopened

As reform progresses, pressure will repeatedly surface demands to revisit earlier decisions. These demands will often be framed as pragmatic, context-sensitive, or necessary for stability. They may be presented as temporary adjustments, transitional accommodations, or politically unavoidable corrections. Implementation logic must therefore be explicit about which questions are closed.

The integrity of the learning spine cannot be reopened in response to coverage anxiety or timetable pressure. Assessment credibility cannot be reopened to manage public discomfort with new result profiles or distributional shifts. Instructional time cannot be reopened to accommodate administrative convenience or initiative accumulation. Minimum professional standards cannot be reopened to preserve universal comfort when performance becomes visible.

Debate can and should continue about how these commitments are enacted. It cannot continue about whether they apply. Once this boundary blurs, coherence unravels rapidly, even if reform language remains intact. Retreat occurs not through explicit rejection, but through repeated reconsideration of what was meant to be settled.

Naming what cannot be reopened is therefore not rigidity. It is protection. It prevents the slow erosion of coherence through reinterpretation, delay, and exception that allows the system to appear stable while learning remains fragile.

• Implementation Logic as a Test of Credibility

This chapter frames implementation not as a technical challenge, but as a test of credibility. Credibility is not established at launch, when momentum is high and expectations are abstract. It is established when enforcement produces discomfort and the system holds its ground.

The decisive moment will arrive when assessment outcomes shift, when familiar narratives break, and when pressure to restore the old equilibrium intensifies. At that point, implementation logic determines whether coherence survives or dissolves. The system will either defend learning integrity or reabsorb pressure by softening standards.

If non-negotiables are defended, instability can be absorbed and learning strengthened over time. If they are softened, stability is preserved temporarily while learning remains shallow and unequal. There is no neutral outcome. Where the Learning Compact defines mutual obligations among actors, this chapter defines the constraints within which those obligations must operate.

Chapters 5 and 6 showed what coherence requires. Chapter 7 showed why sustaining it is politically difficult. This chapter defines the governing rules that determine whether the system holds or retreats. The credibility of the Vision rests on whether these rules are treated as binding when they are most inconvenient. There is no technical fix for this choice. Only a governing one.

Chapter 9. Enabling Conditions for Learning

This chapterexplains why learning reform fails when surrounding conditions operate out of alignment with learning expectations, even when curriculum, assessment, and teaching reforms are well designed.reframes health, nutrition, equity, digital capability, and pathways as system conditions whose sole function is to stabilise learning effort under enforcement, not as parallel social agendas.shows how readiness, inclusion, technology, and transitions can either reinforce the learning spine or become channels through which pressure is absorbed and standards are softened.establishes that equity strengthens coherence only when it protects progression without diluting expectations or creating parallel standards.argues that digital systems are core infrastructure for feedback, motivation, and trust, and that technology which adds load or substitutes for verification weakens reform.demonstrates that transitions and pathways are high-leverage signal points where inconsistent standards rapidly unravel upstream learning.concludes that enabling conditions must be governed as constraints, not alternatives, to prevent retreat through wellbeing, fairness, innovation, or flexibility narratives once enforcement begins.This chapterexplains why learning reform fails when surrounding conditions operate out of alignment with learning expectations, even when curriculum, assessment, and teaching reforms are well designed.reframes health, nutrition, equity, digital capability, and pathways as system conditions whose sole function is to stabilise learning effort under enforcement, not as parallel social agendas.shows how readiness, inclusion, technology, and transitions can either reinforce the learning spine or become channels through which pressure is absorbed and standards are softened.establishes that equity strengthens coherence only when it protects progression without diluting expectations or creating parallel standards.argues that digital systems are core infrastructure for feedback, motivation, and trust, and that technology which adds load or substitutes for verification weakens reform.demonstrates that transitions and pathways are high-leverage signal points where inconsistent standards rapidly unravel upstream learning.concludes that enabling conditions must be governed as constraints, not alternatives, to prevent retreat through wellbeing, fairness, innovation, or flexibility narratives once enforcement begins. This chapterexplains why learning reform fails when surrounding conditions operate out of alignment with learning expectations, even when curriculum, assessment, and teaching reforms are well designed.reframes health, nutrition, equity, digital capability, and pathways as system conditions whose sole function is to stabilise learning effort under enforcement, not as parallel social agendas.shows how readiness, inclusion, technology, and transitions can either reinforce the learning spine or become channels through which pressure is absorbed and standards are softened.establishes that equity strengthens coherence only when it protects progression without diluting expectations or creating parallel standards.argues that digital systems are core infrastructure for feedback, motivation, and trust, and that technology which adds load or substitutes for verification weakens reform.demonstrates that transitions and pathways are high-leverage signal points where inconsistent standards rapidly unravel upstream learning.concludes that enabling conditions must be governed as constraints, not alternatives, to prevent retreat through wellbeing, fairness, innovation, or flexibility narratives once enforcement begins.This chapterexplains why learning reform fails when surrounding conditions operate out of alignment with learning expectations, even when curriculum, assessment, and teaching reforms are well designed.reframes health, nutrition, equity, digital capability, and pathways as system conditions whose sole function is to stabilise learning effort under enforcement, not as parallel social agendas.shows how readiness, inclusion, technology, and transitions can either reinforce the learning spine or become channels through which pressure is absorbed and standards are softened.establishes that equity strengthens coherence only when it protects progression without diluting expectations or creating parallel standards.argues that digital systems are core infrastructure for feedback, motivation, and trust, and that technology which adds load or substitutes for verification weakens reform.demonstrates that transitions and pathways are high-leverage signal points where inconsistent standards rapidly unravel upstream learning.concludes that enabling conditions must be governed as constraints, not alternatives, to prevent retreat through wellbeing, fairness, innovation, or flexibility narratives once enforcement begins.

Learning reform does not fail because curriculum, assessment, or teaching are misunderstood. It fails because the wider conditions that shape readiness, motivation, feedback, trust, and coherence are allowed to operate out of alignment with learning expectations. When this happens, even well-designed reforms are slowly neutralised through pressure that enters from outside the classroom.

This chapter addresses the politically necessary domains that sit around the learning spine. It does not elevate them as parallel priorities, social agendas, or development programmes. It treats them as system conditions whose only legitimate purpose within this Vision is to stabilise learning effort and protect coherence once enforcement begins.

The governing question applied throughout is not whether these domains matter. It is how they behave. Each subsection therefore answers a single test: does this condition reinforce the learning spine and the five system dynamics described in Chapter 3, or does it provide an alternative pathway for absorbing pressure when learning expectations harden?

• Health, Nutrition, and Readiness as Preconditions for Enforcement

Readiness is the most underestimated constraint on learning enforcement. It shapes whether instructional expectations can be held without inducing withdrawal, avoidance, or informal adaptation. Where readiness is weak, teachers do not reject standards explicitly. They adapt around them.

Health, nutrition, and emotional stability feed directly into the readiness–engagement loop described in Chapter 3. Hunger, illness, anxiety, and irregular attendance reduce cognitive bandwidth, weaken concentration, and fragment classroom routines. Over time, this pushes teachers toward survival strategies: slower pacing, repeated rehearsal, selective attention to stronger students, or informal lowering of expectations. These responses are rational under conditions of unstable readiness, but they quietly erode coherence.

The relevance of health and nutrition in this Vision is therefore not humanitarian framing, but system logic. These conditions matter because they determine whether enforcement is feasible without disproportionate strain on classrooms. When readiness is stabilised, instructional expectations can hold. When it is not, pressure to soften standards intensifies upstream.

This chapter therefore treats health and nutrition as learning stabilisers, not welfare add-ons. Their role is to protect attendance regularity, emotional regulation, and sustained engagement so that the learning spine can operate as designed. When they function in this way, they reinforce motivation and trust by making effort feel achievable. When they are treated as parallel social agendas disconnected from instructional routines, they fail to alter classroom dynamics and become another layer of activity without consequence. Readiness is not a marginal concern. It is a precondition for coherence under enforcement.

• Equity and Inclusion as Protection Against Progression Failure

Equity in this Vision is defined narrowly and deliberately. It is not about symbolic access, representation, or parallel provision. It is about protecting progression through the learning spine for learners who face predictable disadvantage.

Inequity enters the system at identifiable pressure points: irregular attendance, language barriers, disability, poverty-related stress, geographic isolation, and early exit. These pressures weaken motivation, distort feedback, and increase the likelihood that learners fall behind early. When this occurs, systems face a choice: intensify support to protect progression, or lower expectations to preserve appearances.

Historically, the latter has been the path of least resistance. Learners are advanced without mastery, assessment is softened in the name of fairness, and inequity is managed through certification rather than learning. This reproduces disadvantage while allowing the system to claim inclusion.

This Vision explicitly rejects that path. Equity strengthens coherence only when it protects progression without diluting standards. Differentiation must occur in time, scaffolding, instructional support, and pacing. It must not occur through lowered expectations, alternative assessment norms, or silent exception.

When inclusion is governed in this way, it reinforces trust. Households see that effort pays off regardless of background. Motivation strengthens because learning remains meaningful. Feedback remains credible because standards do not shift by group or stream. When inclusion is governed otherwise, it becomes a channel through which pressure is absorbed and coherence fragments.

Equity, properly aligned, is therefore not a competing agenda. It is a condition for coherence to endure without reproducing inequality under new language.

• Digital and Technology as a Core Coherence Infrastructure

In a system of Bangladesh’s scale and heterogeneity, digital capability is not optional. It is a structural requirement for coherence. Its importance lies not in innovation or modernisation narratives, but in its ability to reduce variability, accelerate feedback, and lower cognitive and administrative load across the system.

Digital systems matter because they directly shape three of the five dynamics identified in Chapter 3: feedback, motivation, and trust.

First, digital infrastructure can radically shorten feedback loops. When learning progress, instructional gaps, and assessment outcomes become visible earlier and more reliably, corrective action can occur before failure becomes entrenched. Slow, noisy, or aggregated feedback forces enforcement to be blunt and politically costly. Faster, more granular feedback allows support to be targeted and enforcement to be proportionate.

Second, digital tools can reduce heterogeneity by anchoring shared instructional expectations. Structured lesson resources, diagnostic tools, and professional learning materials accessed through common platforms reduce reliance on uneven local capacity. This protects coherence while still allowing professional judgement within clear bounds.

Third, digital systems can strengthen trust by making system signals legible. When teachers understand what is expected, how learning is judged, and how support is triggered, motivation improves. When digital systems are opaque, duplicative, or primarily extractive, they undermine trust and provoke resistance.

The discipline is decisive. Technology must reduce load, not add it. Digital platforms that increase reporting, duplicate paperwork, or create parallel accountability channels weaken coherence. Technology that substitutes for pedagogy rather than supporting it invites superficial compliance and quiet withdrawal.

In this Vision, digital investment is justified only where it strengthens learning signals, accelerates feedback, and stabilises enforcement under scale. Treated otherwise, it becomes a high-profile mechanism for reform dilution.

• Transitions, Pathways, and the Credibility of Signals Across the System

Transitions across years, stages, and streams are among the highest-leverage points in the system. They shape motivation by determining whether effort pays off. They shape trust by determining whether credentials mean the same thing across contexts. They shape feedback by signalling what the system actually values.

This is the only chapter where pathways are addressed explicitly, and the framing is deliberate. Pathways are not discussed in terms of employability slogans or aspiration narratives. They are treated as signal mechanisms that either reinforce or undermine the learning spine.

When transitions reward progression without mastery, upstream learning collapses. When alternative routes allow learners to bypass learning expectations, effort reallocates accordingly. Households respond rationally to perceived risk and reward, intensifying private tutoring or

steering children toward pathways with lower enforcement. Coherence unravels without any formal policy reversal.

This applies across general, technical, and Madrasah streams. Where learning objectives are equivalent, assessment credibility must be equivalent. Stream differentiation cannot operate as a parallel route for absorbing enforcement pressure. Once assessment norms diverge, the learning spine fragments and inequality intensifies through household risk management.

Transitions must therefore be governed to reinforce mastery, not relieve pressure. Choice remains possible, but it cannot function as an escape from learning expectations. Credential credibility is not an outcome of messaging. It is an outcome of enforcement consistency at transition points.

• Enabling Conditions as a Managed System Ecology

Health, equity, digital capability, and pathways do not sit alongside the learning system. They form the ecology in which learning effort is either sustained or exhausted. Each condition interacts with the feedback loops described in Appendix B. When aligned, they reinforce readiness, motivation, feedback, trust, and coherence. When misaligned, they become entry points for retreat.

The central risk is expansion without discipline. Enabling conditions are politically attractive because they signal care, inclusion, and modernisation. Without firm alignment to the learning spine, they accumulate as parallel agendas that dilute focus and weaken enforcement. The system becomes busy, not coherent.

This chapter therefore imposes a governing constraint: enabling conditions exist to stabilise learning enforcement, not to compete with it. They are legitimate only insofar as they protect the spine when pressure arrives.

This framing gives political leaders space to act without reopening foundational design choices. It allows attention to health, equity, technology, and pathways while holding learning integrity fixed. In doing so, it closes a common failure mode of reform: expanding support while quietly withdrawing standards.

• Conditions, Not Alternatives: Political Insulation Against Retreat

This chapter does not expand the reform agenda. It constrains the ways in which pressure may legitimately be absorbed once enforcement begins. Health, equity, technology, and pathways are recognised here not as parallel priorities, compensatory programmes, or political offsets, but as conditions whose sole purpose is to stabilise learning effort and protect coherence under stress.

The distinction matters politically. When learning expectations harden, pressure rarely arrives in the language of curriculum or assessment. It arrives through appeals to wellbeing, fairness, innovation, flexibility, or future opportunity. These appeals are often sincere. They are also the most common vehicles through which coherence is softened without formal reversal.

This chapter therefore functions as insulation. It specifies that enabling conditions may not be used to justify lower standards, delayed enforcement, differentiated credibility, or parallel

certification routes. Health and nutrition cannot be invoked to excuse progression without mastery. Equity cannot be invoked to legitimise separate expectations. Technology cannot be invoked to substitute visibility for verification. Pathways cannot be invoked to absorb pressure through alternative credentials. Where any of these moves occur, they constitute retreat, regardless of intent.

Political leadership is thus protected rather than constrained by this framing. It provides a principled basis for responding to pressure without reopening foundational decisions. Leaders can invest in wellbeing, inclusion, digital systems, and transitions while holding learning integrity fixed. They can point to this chapter as evidence that support is being expanded, even as standards remain enforced.

This insulation is essential because reform rarely fails at the level of design. It fails when political actors are forced to choose between appearing responsive and sustaining coherence. By defining the terms on which responsiveness is permitted, this chapter removes that false choice. It makes clear that responsiveness is legitimate only when it reinforces the learning spine and the five system dynamics described in Chapter 3.

Taken together with Chapters 7 and 8, this chapter closes a critical loophole. It prevents the re- entry of ambiguity through adjacent agendas, well-intentioned accommodation, or symbolic action. It ensures that the conditions surrounding schools strengthen, rather than substitute for, learning enforcement.

Learning reform survives not because pressure disappears, but because the system knows where pressure is allowed to land. This chapter defines that boundary.

Chapter 10. System Learning, Adaptation, and Course Correction

This chapterdefines system learning as a governance function rather than a technical or reflective exercise, and shows why unmanaged learning becomes a mechanism for avoiding enforcement rather than strengthening it.explains how adaptation, experimentation, and evidence have historically been absorbed defensively in Bangladesh through reinterpretation, delay, and parallel practice rather than authorised correction.distinguishes between safe-to-fail experimentation and evidence that must be unsafe to ignore, establishing inevitability of response as the core condition for meaningful learning.shows why pilots and innovation fail to reshape system behaviour when evidence lacks an institutional destination and authority to act on it.sets out a disciplined model of adaptation in which methods, supports, and routines may change, but mastery expectations, assessment credibility, and the learning spine cannot be reopened.examines how inconvenient evidence is neutralised in systems that retreat, and specifies how governed learning reallocates responsibility upward rather than dissipating pressure through ambiguity.concludes that governed learning is the final defence of coherence once enforcement produces disruption, and that systems either learn in ways that strengthen authority or retreat behind pragmatism and narrative management.This chapterdefines system learning as a governance function rather than a technical or reflective exercise, and shows why unmanaged learning becomes a mechanism for avoiding enforcement rather than strengthening it.explains how adaptation, experimentation, and evidence have historically been absorbed defensively in Bangladesh through reinterpretation, delay, and parallel practice rather than authorised correction.distinguishes between safe-to-fail experimentation and evidence that must be unsafe to ignore, establishing inevitability of response as the core condition for meaningful learning.shows why pilots and innovation fail to reshape system behaviour when evidence lacks an institutional destination and authority to act on it.sets out a disciplined model of adaptation in which methods, supports, and routines may change, but mastery expectations, assessment credibility, and the learning spine cannot be reopened.examines how inconvenient evidence is neutralised in systems that retreat, and specifies how governed learning reallocates responsibility upward rather than dissipating pressure through ambiguity.concludes that governed learning is the final defence of coherence once enforcement produces disruption, and that systems either learn in ways that strengthen authority or retreat behind pragmatism and narrative management. This chapterdefines system learning as a governance function rather than a technical or reflective exercise, and shows why unmanaged learning becomes a mechanism for avoiding enforcement rather than strengthening it.explains how adaptation, experimentation, and evidence have historically been absorbed defensively in Bangladesh through reinterpretation, delay, and parallel practice rather than authorised correction.distinguishes between safe-to-fail experimentation and evidence that must be unsafe to ignore, establishing inevitability of response as the core condition for meaningful learning.shows why pilots and innovation fail to reshape system behaviour when evidence lacks an institutional destination and authority to act on it.sets out a disciplined model of adaptation in which methods, supports, and routines may change, but mastery expectations, assessment credibility, and the learning spine cannot be reopened.examines how inconvenient evidence is neutralised in systems that retreat, and specifies how governed learning reallocates responsibility upward rather than dissipating pressure through ambiguity.concludes that governed learning is the final defence of coherence once enforcement produces disruption, and that systems either learn in ways that strengthen authority or retreat behind pragmatism and narrative management.This chapterdefines system learning as a governance function rather than a technical or reflective exercise, and shows why unmanaged learning becomes a mechanism for avoiding enforcement rather than strengthening it.explains how adaptation, experimentation, and evidence have historically been absorbed defensively in Bangladesh through reinterpretation, delay, and parallel practice rather than authorised correction.distinguishes between safe-to-fail experimentation and evidence that must be unsafe to ignore, establishing inevitability of response as the core condition for meaningful learning.shows why pilots and innovation fail to reshape system behaviour when evidence lacks an institutional destination and authority to act on it.sets out a disciplined model of adaptation in which methods, supports, and routines may change, but mastery expectations, assessment credibility, and the learning spine cannot be reopened.examines how inconvenient evidence is neutralised in systems that retreat, and specifies how governed learning reallocates responsibility upward rather than dissipating pressure through ambiguity.concludes that governed learning is the final defence of coherence once enforcement produces disruption, and that systems either learn in ways that strengthen authority or retreat behind pragmatism and narrative management.

This chapter defines how the education system learns without losing coherence, authority, or credibility. It addresses a recurring failure in reform: when learning and adaptation become substitutes for enforcement rather than mechanisms for strengthening it.

No reform can anticipate all behavioural responses, institutional frictions, or contextual variation. Some adaptation is therefore necessary. However, adaptation is not neutral. In systems without clear governing rules, learning becomes a way to reopen settled decisions, defer accountability, or absorb pressure without visible retreat. Evidence circulates, pilots multiply, and reflection replaces decision, while core commitments quietly erode.

Bangladesh’s education system has struggled to learn in ways that reinforce reform. New methods generate discomfort, threaten established interests, and expose uneven capacity. Imported models fail without contextualisation, while locally generated ideas lack institutional destinations. As a result, adaptation has tended to occur informally and defensively, through reinterpretation, delay, or parallel practice, rather than through authorised course correction.

This chapter establishes a disciplined logic for system learning. It specifies how experimentation can occur without fragmenting signals, how evidence can trigger tightening or redesign without loss of face, and how ideas can enter governance rather than circulate at the margins. Learning here is not openness for its own sake. It is a governed function, oriented toward strengthening the learning spine rather than renegotiating it.

In doing so, the chapter acts as an insurance policy against retreat disguised as learning. It ensures that adaptation works toward coherence, not away from it, and that correction strengthens authority rather than undermining it.

• Why System Learning Is a Governance Problem, Not a Technical One

Education systems inevitably operate under uncertainty. Classrooms differ. Teacher capability varies. Communities face distinct constraints. Policies interact in ways that cannot be fully predicted at design stage. No reform, however well conceived, survives intact once it encounters daily practice.

The central question is therefore not whether adaptation is required, but how adaptation is authorised, constrained, and directed.

In Bangladesh, adaptation has historically occurred informally and defensively. When outcomes disappoint, explanations proliferate. Context is emphasised. Responsibility diffuses across institutions. Authority retreats behind complexity. This is not a failure of intelligence or effort. It is a rational response to incentives in a system where learning has no clear institutional destination.

When system learning is unmanaged, it becomes a mechanism for avoiding enforcement rather than improving it. Evidence circulates without consequence. Reviews accumulate without reallocation of responsibility. Reflection becomes performative rather than corrective. The system appears active and thoughtful while behaviour remains unchanged.

A coherent system requires a different settlement. Learning must be institutionalised, directional, and bounded. It must operate within fixed commitments rather than reopening them. Without these constraints, learning does not strengthen reform. It dissolves it.

• From Projects to System Learning

Bangladesh does not lack experimentation. Across curriculum, assessment, teacher training, technology, nutrition, and service delivery, discrete initiatives have repeatedly demonstrated local success. Pilot programmes have improved attendance, raised short-term learning gains, and strengthened teacher practice in specific settings.

Yet these gains have rarely reshaped system-wide behaviour. The same problems reappear. New initiatives replicate old designs. Institutional routines remain largely unchanged. This pattern reflects not failure of innovation, but failure of learning loops.

Projects generate insights, but the system lacks routines that convert those insights into collective capability. Pilots end. Reports are produced. Lessons are acknowledged. Then the system resets. Knowledge remains local while authority remains static.

A learning system treats pilots differently. Pilots are not proof-of-concept exercises or political signals. They are diagnostic instruments. Their purpose is to reveal where institutional incentives break, where authority fails to travel, and where routines absorb pressure instead of correcting it.

For learning to scale, evidence must have an institutional destination. Someone must be authorised to interpret it. Someone must be required to act on it. Without this, pilots multiply while learning stagnates, and experimentation becomes insulation rather than adaptation.

• Safe-to-Fail Experimentation, Unsafe-to-Ignore Evidence

A coherent system distinguishes clearly between experimentation and evidence. Experimentation must be safe to fail. Officials, teachers, and institutions must be able to test approaches without fear that every deviation will trigger sanction. Without this protection, risk aversion dominates. Innovation collapses into compliance. The system becomes brittle precisely where flexibility is needed.

Evidence, however, must be unsafe to ignore. Once an intervention has been tested, once patterns are visible, once outcomes repeat across contexts, the system must respond. At that point, continued inaction is no longer caution. It is retreat. The refusal to act on evidence becomes an active choice to preserve institutional comfort over learning integrity.

Bangladesh’s administrative culture has often collapsed this distinction. Fear of blame suppresses experimentation, while fear of consequence neutralises evidence. The result is a system that neither innovates nor corrects. New methods are resisted, and old failures are tolerated.

Governed learning requires separating these functions. Freedom to test must coexist with inevitability of response. Only then can experimentation generate improvement rather than fatigue.

• Local Adaptation Without Imported Illusion

Bangladesh cannot import education solutions wholesale. Pedagogies, technologies, and governance models developed elsewhere reflect different institutional histories, political settlements, and social expectations. Direct transplantation often produces surface compliance without functional change.

At the same time, Bangladesh cannot afford to reinvent solutions unnecessarily. Global evidence matters. Comparative experience matters. Ignoring it wastes time and resources.

System learning therefore serves a specific purpose: to translate global knowledge into local function. The task is not originality for its own sake, but fitness for context. The metaphor is not invention, but engineering. The wheel already exists. The challenge is to make it work on Bangladesh’s roads.

This requires disciplined adaptation. Borrowed ideas must be tested against local feedback loops: readiness, motivation, trust, feedback, and coherence. What strengthens those dynamics should be adapted and scaled. What weakens them should be rejected, regardless of international endorsement or donor enthusiasm.

Innovation in this sense is not experimentation without anchor. It is selective adjustment in service of fixed learning goals. Without this discipline, innovation becomes theatre rather than transformation.

• Learning, Data, and the Dual Role of Governance

Data and evidence do not serve learning alone. They also serve governance. In Bangladesh, data have historically been used primarily for compliance, surveillance, and distribution. This has shaped behaviour. Reporting becomes defensive. Indicators multiply. Measurement crowds out meaning. Learning recedes as institutions optimise for visibility rather than improvement.

A coherent system repurposes data without abandoning authority. Information must still support accountability, but it must also inform redesign. Evidence should not only reward and punish. It should clarify where routines fail, where incentives misfire, and where authority must intervene upstream rather than shifting pressure downward.

This learning function of governance is often overlooked. Many of the system’s most important insights, including those documented in Appendix A and Appendix B, did not emerge from administration. They emerged from research. Ideas had to be generated before they could be governed.

A system that assumes ideas already exist governs blind. It enforces without understanding and retreats when enforcement produces unintended consequences. A learning state invests deliberately in idea generation, synthesis, and interpretation as part of its governing capacity.

• Controlled Adaptation, Not Continuous Negotiation

Learning does not imply constant adjustment. Continuous renegotiation erodes credibility.

A coherent system distinguishes between parameters that are fixed and routines that are adaptable. Learning is permitted to redesign methods, supports, sequencing, and institutional processes. It is not permitted to reopen mastery expectations, assessment credibility, progression rules, or the learning spine itself.

When this boundary is unclear, adaptation becomes indistinguishable from retreat. Standards soften incrementally. Timelines stretch. Exceptions accumulate. Reform survives rhetorically while coherence dissolves operationally.

Controlled adaptation strengthens authority precisely because it signals that learning occurs within limits. The system listens, adjusts, and corrects, but it does not bargain with its own commitments. This balance is difficult, but essential. Without it, learning becomes the language through which authority abdicates responsibility.

• Where Inconvenient Evidence Goes

The decisive test of system learning is not whether evidence exists, but what happens when it becomes inconvenient. In Bangladesh, inconvenient evidence has historically followed predictable paths. It is delayed until relevance fades. It is reframed as context-specific rather than systemic. It is displaced by new indicators that restore comfort. Or it is acknowledged rhetorically while routines remain unchanged. These responses are not accidental. They are institutional strategies for absorbing pressure without reallocating responsibility.

When learning outcomes threaten legitimacy, systems face a choice. They can tighten alignment and correct practice, or they can dissipate pressure through ambiguity. The latter is easier in the short run. It preserves institutional calm, protects informal settlements, and avoids visible disruption. But it also entrenches fragility. Over time, the system becomes dependent on narrative management rather than performance. Under coherence, this pathway must be closed.

Evidence that contradicts expectations must trigger a defined response chain. Data cannot circulate without destination. When assessment outcomes shift, when progression stalls, or when variation widens, the system must know in advance where that evidence goes, who interprets it, and what forms of adjustment are authorised. Without this, information accumulates while behaviour remains static, and learning collapses into documentation.

This does not imply automatic sanction or mechanical response. It implies inevitability of consequence. Sometimes the response will be tighter enforcement. Sometimes it will be redesign of support, sequencing, or institutional routines. Sometimes it will be retirement of practices that no longer serve learning. What matters is that evidence cannot simply be absorbed by time.

In systems that retreat, inconvenient evidence is managed until it disappears. In systems that learn, inconvenient evidence is governed until it produces adjustment.

• Learning as the Final Defence Against Retreat

This chapter frames system learning not as a technical capability, but as the final defence of coherence when pressure intensifies.

Chapters 5 and 6 defined what coherence requires in classrooms and institutions. Chapter 7 showed why sustaining it is politically difficult once enforcement begins to bite. Chapter 8 established the non-negotiables that prevent retreat through reinterpretation. Chapter 9 set boundaries around enabling conditions so that support does not fragment the learning spine. This chapter completes the logic by addressing what happens when reality refuses to cooperate.

Every serious reform encounters moments where results destabilise familiar narratives. Pass rates dip. Variation becomes visible. Previously hidden weaknesses surface. At these moments, authority is tested. Systems either govern adaptation or retreat behind pragmatism.

If learning is weak or unmanaged, authority reacts defensively. Enforcement is softened. Standards are quietly recalibrated. Accountability is postponed. The system stabilises in appearance while learning remains shallow and unequal. Retreat occurs without announcement.

If learning is governed, authority holds. Evidence is allowed to reallocate responsibility upward. Adjustment occurs within fixed commitments. Discomfort is absorbed through redesign rather than denial. Coherence survives because the system learns without reopening what was meant to be settled.

There is no neutral path between these outcomes. Learning either strengthens authority or undermines it. Systems that cannot learn eventually rely on symbolism, coercion, or silence. Systems that can learn preserve legitimacy precisely because they are willing to adjust in the

open. Bangladesh does not require perfect plans or imported certainty. It requires a system capable of learning under pressure without losing direction, authority, or coherence. This chapter defines the conditions under which that is possible.

It is not a call for experimentation without limits, nor for flexibility without discipline. It is a statement that in a system committed to learning at scale, governed learning is not optional. It is the only mechanism through which coherence survives contact with reality.

Chapter 11. A National Compact for Learning and the Test of Credibility

This chapterargues that Bangladesh’s learning crisis persists not because of weak intent, but because the system repeatedly avoided the political and institutional costs of enforcing learning integrity.defines a national compact that makes explicit, reciprocal demands on teachers, families, institutions, and the state once learning becomes visible and enforcement begins.sets out the state’s core commitments, including non-withdrawal of coherence, preservation of assessment credibility, bounded phasing without exemption, and refusal to manage results for appearance.reframes state accountability as responsibility for protecting learning integrity over time, not merely expanding access, infrastructure, or certification.concludes that the Vision will be judged not by its analysis or ambition, but by whether coherence is defended when enforcement becomes politically uncomfortable.This chapterargues that Bangladesh’s learning crisis persists not because of weak intent, but because the system repeatedly avoided the political and institutional costs of enforcing learning integrity.defines a national compact that makes explicit, reciprocal demands on teachers, families, institutions, and the state once learning becomes visible and enforcement begins.sets out the state’s core commitments, including non-withdrawal of coherence, preservation of assessment credibility, bounded phasing without exemption, and refusal to manage results for appearance.reframes state accountability as responsibility for protecting learning integrity over time, not merely expanding access, infrastructure, or certification.concludes that the Vision will be judged not by its analysis or ambition, but by whether coherence is defended when enforcement becomes politically uncomfortable. This chapterargues that Bangladesh’s learning crisis persists not because of weak intent, but because the system repeatedly avoided the political and institutional costs of enforcing learning integrity.defines a national compact that makes explicit, reciprocal demands on teachers, families, institutions, and the state once learning becomes visible and enforcement begins.sets out the state’s core commitments, including non-withdrawal of coherence, preservation of assessment credibility, bounded phasing without exemption, and refusal to manage results for appearance.reframes state accountability as responsibility for protecting learning integrity over time, not merely expanding access, infrastructure, or certification.concludes that the Vision will be judged not by its analysis or ambition, but by whether coherence is defended when enforcement becomes politically uncomfortable.This chapterargues that Bangladesh’s learning crisis persists not because of weak intent, but because the system repeatedly avoided the political and institutional costs of enforcing learning integrity.defines a national compact that makes explicit, reciprocal demands on teachers, families, institutions, and the state once learning becomes visible and enforcement begins.sets out the state’s core commitments, including non-withdrawal of coherence, preservation of assessment credibility, bounded phasing without exemption, and refusal to manage results for appearance.reframes state accountability as responsibility for protecting learning integrity over time, not merely expanding access, infrastructure, or certification.concludes that the Vision will be judged not by its analysis or ambition, but by whether coherence is defended when enforcement becomes politically uncomfortable.

This Vision has made a deliberate choice. It has described Bangladesh’s education crisis not as a failure of effort or intention, but as the result of a stable equilibrium in which weak learning was tolerated, managed, and defended alongside expanding credentials and visible success. That equilibrium did not persist because problems were unknown. It persisted because confronting them carried political, institutional, and economic costs that the system repeatedly chose not to bear.

This final chapter sets out what it would take to break that equilibrium. It does not propose another programme, initiative, or reform layer. It defines the national compact required for coherence to survive once learning becomes visible, enforcement begins to bite, and familiar accommodations are no longer available.

1. What the System Is Asking For

If this Vision is taken seriously, it makes concrete demands of every actor in the system.

From teachers and school leaders, it asks for professional accountability under conditions of clarity. Expectations will be explicit. Progression without mastery will no longer be normalised. Instructional avoidance cannot be absorbed indefinitely once support is in place. This is not a demand for heroism, but for professionalism within a system that aligns curriculum, assessment, supervision, and support.

From families, it asks for tolerance of transition. As assessment credibility is restored, results may initially become more volatile. Familiar shortcuts may no longer work. Coaching markets will lose some of their protective value. This Vision asks families to accept short-term uncertainty in exchange for long-term integrity: credentials that once again mean learning, and pathways that do not require private risk management to navigate.

From institutions, it asks for something harder. It asks for a willingness to enforce standards even when doing so is costly. It asks institutions to resist the reflex to absorb pressure through delay, reinterpretation, or quiet adjustment. It asks them to place capable people where learning integrity requires them, not where convenience or patronage dictates. It asks them to allow evidence to reallocate responsibility upward, rather than pushing consequences downward onto classrooms and households.

These demands are uncomfortable by design. They challenge practices that have stabilised the system for decades.

1. What the State Commits in Return

A compact cannot be one-sided. If the system is asked to change behaviour, the state must bind itself to clear commitments.

First, coherence will not be withdrawn. Curriculum priorities, assessment standards, and progression rules will not be softened quietly when results become politically inconvenient. The learning spine will not be treated as provisional.

Second, assessment credibility will not be managed for appearances. Pass rates will not be restored through marking adjustment. Volatility will not be hidden through recalibration. When outcomes shift, the response will be support, enforcement, or redesign, not distortion.

Third, expectations will not be shifted back onto classrooms. When learning outcomes fall short, responsibility will not be displaced downward through blame or rhetoric. Evidence will be allowed to travel upward, triggering institutional correction where authority and resources actually sit.

Fourth, phasing will not mean exemption. Sequencing will be used to build capability, not to reopen settled commitments. Transition periods will be bounded. The end state will remain fixed.

Finally, governance will protect learning institutions from routine politicisation. Bodies responsible for curriculum, assessment, supervision, and certification will not be treated as sites for accommodation, patronage, or pressure absorption. Appointments, postings, and decisions that shape learning integrity will be governed accordingly, because without this constraint, no technical reform can survive.

These are not promises of perfection. They are promises of restraint.

1. Accountability of the State

Chapter 2 showed that weak learning persisted not because the system lacked rules, but because enforcement was selective and reversible. Authority was applied where it produced visible order and relaxed where it threatened stability or exposed uncomfortable truths.

This Vision insists on a different accountability settlement. The state will be accountable not only for expanding access, delivering infrastructure, or issuing credentials, but for protecting the integrity of learning outcomes over time. When learning fails, the response will not be symbolic action or narrative management. It will be governed adjustment.

This requires accepting that some practices must end. Quiet grade manipulation. Automatic progression to preserve calm. Appointments that weaken core institutions. Data used to perform upward and punish downward, but never to redesign. These practices are not neutral. They are how retreat has historically been managed. The compact requires that these escape routes be closed.

1. The Line That Will Not Be Crossed

Bangladesh does not lack ambition. It does not lack effort. It does not lack people who care.

What it has lacked is a credible commitment to protect learning from the everyday practices that undo reform while preserving surface stability. This Vision draws a clear line. Learning integrity will not be traded for administrative convenience or political comfort.

That line applies when assessment results destabilise familiar narratives. It applies when enforcement produces resistance. It applies when institutional routines are tested. It applies when pressure arrives to restore calm by softening standards, shifting responsibility, or diluting signals.

Ideas will need to be generated. Evidence will need to be interpreted. Adaptation will be necessary. But these will occur within fixed commitments, not at their expense. This is the test of credibility.

Bangladesh does not lack knowledge of its education crisis. It lacks a record of holding course when reform becomes politically uncomfortable. This Vision succeeds or fails not on its analysis or design, but on whether coherence is defended when resistance emerges and old accommodations become tempting. There is no technical fix for this choice. Only a governing one.

Appendix A: System diagnosis: why schooling has expanded but learning has not

This appendix consolidates the diagnostic evidence that underpins the reform priorities set out in the Vision and Implementation Framework. It draws together system-wide reviews, administrative statistics, sector performance reporting, and independent monitoring to provide a grounded account of how Bangladesh’s education system currently functions in practice.

The purpose of this appendix is not to restate policy aspirations or reform intent. Throughout this appendix, ‘learning’ refers to demonstrable mastery of foundational literacy and numeracy, the ability to reason and apply knowledge, and the development of transferable skills required for progression to further education, work, and civic participation. The appendix documents observed patterns in learning outcomes, system behaviour, and implementation performance, and identifies the institutional arrangements and incentive dynamics that help explain why sustained expansion in schooling has not translated into commensurate gains in learning.

Several aspects of the diagnosis touch on politically and institutionally sensitive areas, including governance, accountability, assessment credibility, and resource use. For this reason, the analysis is explicitly evidence-led and triangulated across multiple system-facing sources, rather than relying on any single report or study. Where political incentives and public signalling are discussed, they are treated as analytical features of system behaviour rather than as normative judgements about individual actors.

At the same time, the diagnosis recognises a harder pattern that emerges across multiple sources: the system did not only tolerate weak learning. Over time, it frequently managed around it, using administrative discretion, assessment design, and public signalling to stabilise politically salient outcomes even as independent learning evidence remained weak. Success was often produced through visible proxies (coverage, infrastructure, enrolment, headline results), while the integrity of learning signals and the discipline of follow-through remained weak. In periods where learning evidence was persistently poor, the system’s most reliable consequences were attached to administrative outputs, compliance, and politically salient indicators. This created space for discretion in enforcement, assessment stringency, and reporting standards, and it enabled rent-bearing behaviours to stabilise in predictable places, including examinations, tutoring markets, and local resource chains.

Evidence base and citation conventions

The diagnosis in this appendix relies primarily on a small set of system-wide sources that are cited repeatedly across sections because they provide one or more of the following:

• national coverage,
• official administrative or sector reporting, or
• independent monitoring at scale.

For readability and consistency, each core source is assigned a short title that is used throughout the appendix.

• White Paper

White Paper on the State of the Bangladesh Economy: Dissection of a Development Narrative (2025), Chapter 14 (Education)

• Task Force Report

Re-strategising the Economy and Mobilising Resources for Equitable and Sustainable Development (2025)

• Consultation Committee Report

Consultation Committee Report on Primary and Mass Education (2025)

• BANBEIS 2023 Statistics

Bangladesh Education Statistics 2023 (published 2024)

• ASPR 2022–2023

Annual Sector Performance Report: Education Sector (2022; 2023)

• Education Watch

Education Watch reports (multiple rounds, CAMPE)

These sources are used because they recur across national policy discussion and collectively cover the core dimensions required for system diagnosis: learning outcomes, assessment and credential signals, resourcing and financing, governance and accountability, service delivery performance, and equity and stratification.

Other studies and specialised analyses (including governance micro-studies and programme- specific evaluations) are used selectively to illuminate mechanisms or confirm patterns and are footnoted locally when introduced. They are not treated as primary system diagnostics.

How to read this diagnosis

Appendix A is structured as a system diagnosis, not a thematic literature review. Each section examines a core subsystem of education delivery and traces how observed outcomes emerge from the interaction between policy design, institutional arrangements, incentives, and behaviour at scale.

The diagnosis proceeds in six linked parts:

1. A1.1 Learning foundations, classroom practice, and progression

Examines how early readiness gaps, weak foundational learning, and classroom realities interact to produce cumulative learning deficits across grades.

1. A1.2 Assessment, credentials, and learning signals

Analyses how public examinations, grading practices, and integrity failures shape behaviour, distort incentives, and weaken the signalling value of credentials.

1. A1.3 Governance failures, incentives, and resource leakages

Examines how fragmented authority, weak accountability, and low-powered enforcement affect teacher effort, supervision, and resource use.

1. A1.4 Education financing, expenditure efficiency, and cost shifting

Assesses both the level and composition of public spending, and how weak linkage between finance and learning outcomes has shifted effective costs onto households.

1. A1.5 Equity and inclusion

Diagnoses how poverty, gender, geography, disability, and language interact to produce cumulative disadvantage in participation, learning, and progression.

1. A1.6 Education streams and stratification

Analyses how parallel education streams function as stratified pathways with unequal learning conditions, credentials, and mobility.

Across sections, the diagnosis emphasises patterns rather than isolated failures. Weak learning outcomes, assessment volatility, governance leakage, household risk management, and stream stratification are treated as mutually reinforcing features of the current system equilibrium, not as independent problems.

Where possible, claims are triangulated across administrative data, independent assessments, household surveys, and sector performance reporting. Where evidence is incomplete or uneven, this is made explicit. The aim is not attribution of blame, but identification of the structural constraints and incentive dynamics that any credible reform agenda must address.

Taken together, Appendix A provides the empirical and analytical foundation for the Vision and Implementation Framework. It explains not only what is not working, but why, and therefore clarifies where reform effort is most likely to unlock sustained improvements in learning.

A1 Learning foundations, classroom practice, and progressions.

This section examines how learning foundations, classroom practice, and progression interact to shape student outcomes across the school cycle. It traces how early readiness gaps emerge before school entry, how weak foundations persist through primary and lower secondary education, and how day-to-day instructional practices and curriculum pressures reinforce these patterns over time.

Taken together, the evidence highlights a system in which students progress through grades without consistent mastery, as classroom realities, instructional time constraints, and curriculum design combine to widen learning gaps rather than close them.

A1.1 School readiness and pre-primary foundations

Learning gaps in Bangladesh do not begin in Grade 1. They begin before school starts, and the evidence indicates that early-childhood access and developmental readiness remain structurally constrained relative to the size of the cohort. A recent joint study by the Department of Primary Education and UNICEF2 shows that of the 11.3 million children aged 3–5 in Bangladesh, only

3.5 million receive early learning opportunities across all school types. Similarly, Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS) data indicate that only 18.9 per cent of children aged 3–5 are accessing early learning programmes, while 25.5 per cent are not developmentally on track.

Policy intent exists, as shown by the launch of a pilot in 3,214 government primary schools in 2023, but implementation readiness is uneven. Crucially, the feasibility study finds that “availability” at the policy level did not automatically translate into enrolment at the community level: in piloting school catchment areas, enrolment was 16.6 per cent for children aged 4+ and 27.6 per cent for children aged 5+. The study also documents constraints that matter directly for readiness outcomes, including shortages of qualified teachers, gaps in age- appropriate WASH and learning or play materials, and uneven community understanding of play-based pedagogies, all of which reduced enrolment and engagement.

These constraints imply that the system is attempting to deliver primary schooling to a cohort in which many children begin formal learning without consistent prior exposure to structured

2 DPE & UNICEF. (2025) Study on the Feasibility of Scale-up of the Two-year Pre-primary Education in Government Primary Schools in Bangladesh, Government of Bangladesh and UNICEF.

early learning routines, language-rich interaction, and age-appropriate foundational development. Readiness is therefore not only an “early years” issue but a delivery design problem: when early learning provision is thin, uneven, or perceived as low value, the system inherits avoidable heterogeneity in readiness at the start of primary school. This heterogeneity then amplifies classroom difficulty in the early grades and contributes to widening learning gaps as children progress through the system

A1.2 Foundational learning outcomes and progression from primary to lower secondary

Evidence from national assessments shows that a large share of students complete primary education without mastering foundational competencies, and that these gaps persist into lower secondary education. The National Student Assessment at Grade 5 provides the clearest benchmark of learning at the end of primary school. In the 2017 cycle, only 44 percent of students achieved grade-level proficiency in Bangla, while 35 percent achieved expected proficiency in mathematics (NSA 2017)3. The 2022 cycle shows no meaningful improvement in Bangla and a decline in mathematics proficiency to around 30 percent, despite five additional years of policy reform and investment (NSA 2022)4. This implies that roughly two-thirds of students complete primary school without grade-level numeracy, and more than half without grade-level literacy.

Similarly, household-based assessments reinforce the scale of the problem. Education Watch reports from 2022 and 2024 show that approximately 50 percent of students in Grades 3 and 5 are unable to read a Grade 2-level text fluently, and between 45 and 55 percent cannot correctly perform basic two-digit subtraction. These findings indicate that weak learning is not confined to assessment samples but is visible at household and classroom level.

Lower secondary assessments show that these deficits are not systematically remediated. The National Assessment of Secondary Students at Grade 8 reports that a majority of students fail to meet expected competency thresholds in mathematics and science, particularly on items requiring reasoning rather than recall. In mathematics, fewer than ~ 40 percent of students demonstrate competency aligned with grade expectations, and performance drops sharply on multi-step or applied questions.

This learning bottleneck coincides with rising dropout. BANBEIS 2023 statistics show that while survival to Grade 5 exceeds 85 percent, dropout accelerates in lower secondary education. By Grade 10, cumulative dropout exceeds 30 percent, with the steepest losses occurring between Grades 8 and 10. These patterns are consistent with assessment evidence showing that students struggle to cope with increased curricular abstraction in the absence of secure foundational learning.

By higher secondary education, learning gaps have largely hardened. Reviews conducted in the Task Force Report and reflected in other national policy analysis note that many students reaching Grade 12 lack proficiency in analytical writing, problem-solving, and independent learning, even when they pass public examinations. Employers and tertiary institutions consistently report that new entrants require remediation in basic reasoning and communication skills.

3 National Student Assessment 2017 (Grades 3 and 5). Government of Bangladesh.

4 National Student Assessment 2022 (Grades 3 and 5). Government of Bangladesh.

Recent examination cycles provide additional confirmation. Where grading practices were less accommodative, pass rates and grade distributions fell sharply, revealing gaps in student preparedness rather than sudden deterioration in cohort ability. These outcomes suggest that earlier examination performance overstated learning achievement and masked accumulated deficits. Detailed analysis of assessment credibility and inflation is presented in the following section, but the learning evidence here indicates that weak results reflect long-standing gaps rather than short-term shocks.

Taken together, the evidence shows that Bangladesh’s education system enables grade progression without ensuring mastery at key transition points. Weak foundations at the end of primary school persist into lower secondary education, and by higher secondary level many students remain under-prepared for the cognitive demands of further study or skilled employment.

A1.3 Classroom practice and instructional time

Evidence from classroom observations and administrative data indicates that weak learning outcomes are closely linked to how instruction is organised and delivered on a day-to-day basis. Across primary and lower secondary classrooms, teaching practices prioritise syllabus completion and examination preparation over mastery, while effective instructional time is substantially lower than implied by official timetables.

Education Watch classroom observations conducted across multiple rounds show that rote- based practices dominate the majority of observed lessons. In typical primary classrooms, a large share of instructional time is devoted to copying from the board, choral repetition, and mechanical exercises aligned to anticipated examination questions. Activities associated with effective foundational learning, including guided reading, structured problem-solving, discussion, and formative feedback, are observed far less frequently. Across observation rounds, fewer than one in three lessons include any sustained opportunity for students to explain reasoning or receive individual feedback.

These instructional patterns persist across school types and regions. Importantly, they are observed not only in poorly resourced schools but also in schools with adequate buildings and textbook supply. This suggests that pedagogy is shaped primarily by system incentives and assessment pressures rather than by material shortages alone.

Effective instructional time is further constrained by teacher absence and non-teaching demands. Education Watch unannounced school visits report teacher absence rates ranging from 15 to 25 percent, with higher absence in rural areas, char regions, and urban informal settlements. In schools with fewer teachers, the absence of even one teacher results in class cancellations or ad hoc supervision, further reducing learning time.

When teachers are present, a significant proportion of the school day is absorbed by administrative and non-instructional tasks. Sector performance reporting further confirms these constraints. The Annual Sector Performance Reports (ASPR) for 2022 and 2023 record repeated disruptions to instructional time arising from non-teaching assignments, emergency response activities, and administrative directives issued through multiple channels. While these disruptions are treated as operational issues in sector reporting, their cumulative effect is to reduce effective teaching time and reinforce coverage-oriented pedagogy. The Consultation Committee Report similarly documents that teachers and head teachers are frequently engaged

in data reporting, stipend administration, examination logistics, and other tasks assigned by multiple authorities. As a result, the actual time devoted to focused instruction falls well below scheduled instructional hours, particularly in government primary and secondary schools.

Large class sizes amplify these constraints. BANBEIS 2023 statistics show that pupil–teacher ratios in government primary schools commonly exceed 40 students per teacher, and exceed 50 students per teacher in many disadvantaged locations. In classrooms of this size, even motivated teachers face severe limits on their ability to monitor individual learning, diagnose misconceptions, or provide corrective feedback. As a result, instruction defaults to whole-class methods that privilege coverage over understanding.

Multi-grade teaching remains widespread in remote and hard-to-reach areas. BANBEIS 2023 statistics and Education Watch fieldwork indicate that a significant share of rural primary schools operate with multi-grade classrooms, often without specialised training or materials to support such teaching arrangements. This further reduces effective instructional time per grade and increases reliance on self-directed copying and repetition.

Curriculum pacing pressures reinforce these patterns. Teachers report strong expectations to complete prescribed syllabi within fixed timeframes, regardless of student readiness. Following COVID-19 school closures, curricula were largely reinstated without systematic prioritisation or catch-up sequencing, despite evidence of learning loss. Under these conditions, teachers rationally prioritise coverage of examinable content, even when large numbers of students have not mastered prerequisite skills.

Taken together, the evidence shows that students receive significantly less effective instruction than policy frameworks assume. Reduced instructional time, large class sizes, rote-dominated pedagogy, and administrative overload interact to constrain learning, particularly for students who enter classrooms with weak foundations. Without changes to how instructional time is protected and used, improvements in curriculum or assessment design alone are unlikely to translate into better learning outcomes.

A1.4 Classroom conditions and curriculum pressures across grades

Curriculum expectations and classroom conditions interact to shape what teachers are realistically able to deliver. Evidence from national reviews, administrative data, and field- based studies shows that dense syllabi, limited prioritisation of foundational competencies, and sharp transitions in cognitive demand place sustained pressure on instructional practice. These pressures intensify as students move through the system, particularly in contexts characterised by large classes, limited instructional time, and shortages of subject-qualified teachers.

Primary education (Grades 1–5)

At primary level, curriculum density relative to available instructional time is a recurring concern. The Consultation Committee Report documents that the prescribed primary syllabus requires teachers to cover a wide range of content each year, with limited guidance on prioritisation when students fall behind. In practice, this places pressure on teachers to move through material at pace, even when a substantial share of students have not mastered prerequisite skills.

The White Paper reinforces this diagnosis, noting that the primary curriculum places insufficient emphasis on consolidation of foundational literacy and numeracy in the early grades, particularly in Grades 1 and 2. Where remediation mechanisms exist, they are not systematically embedded in classroom routines. As a result, students who fall behind early are carried forward without targeted support, contributing to the accumulation of learning gaps observed at the end of primary school.

Classroom conditions amplify these curriculum pressures. Large class sizes and limited instructional time reduce opportunities for teachers to slow down instruction or revisit earlier content. Under these constraints, coverage-oriented teaching becomes a rational response to syllabus expectations, reinforcing rote practices documented in classroom observations.

Lower secondary education (Grades 6–8)

Curriculum pressures intensify at the transition to lower secondary education. The White Paper and the Task Force Report both highlight a sharp increase in abstraction and content load beginning in Grades 6 to 8, particularly in mathematics and science (White Paper; Task Force Report). Students are expected to shift rapidly from basic operations to algebraic reasoning, and from factual recall to conceptual understanding, often without sufficient bridging or diagnostic support.

This transition coincides with evidence of weak foundational learning at the end of primary school. As a result, many students enter lower secondary education without the literacy and numeracy required to engage meaningfully with the curriculum. Education Watch classroom observations at lower secondary level indicate continued reliance on whole-class instruction and memorisation, with limited adaptation to varied student readiness.

Teacher deployment patterns further constrain delivery. BANBEIS 2023 statistics show that shortages of subject-qualified teachers in mathematics, science, and English are concentrated in rural and disadvantaged schools. Where subject specialists are unavailable, teachers are often required to teach outside their area of training, reducing instructional depth precisely at the stage when curricular demands increase most sharply.

Higher secondary education (Grades 11–12)

At higher secondary level, curriculum demands remain dense and examination-oriented. The Task Force Report notes that syllabi at Grades 11 and 12 prioritise coverage of examinable content, leaving limited space for extended problem-solving, analytical writing, or independent inquiry. While assessments require demonstration of higher-order skills, classroom instruction remains constrained by time pressure and syllabus breadth.

The White Paper further observes that higher secondary curricula are weakly aligned with the competencies required for tertiary education and skilled employment, particularly in areas such as critical reasoning, applied knowledge, and communication. As a result, many students complete higher secondary education having met formal curriculum requirements without developing the skills expected at the next stage of education or work.

The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated these challenges. Despite documented learning losses during prolonged school closures, curriculum expectations at lower and higher secondary levels were largely reinstated without systematic compression or reprioritisation (White Paper;

Task Force Report). Teachers reported pressure to complete the syllabus within shortened effective school years, reinforcing surface learning strategies and limiting opportunities for remediation.

Language of instruction compounds curriculum difficulty across grades. In multilingual regions, students are required to engage with increasingly abstract content in Bangla or English, even when these are not their home languages. Evidence cited in national reviews indicates that this reduces comprehension and participation, particularly in science and mathematics at lower secondary level (White Paper).

Diagnostic domain	Indicator	Magnitude / pattern	Source
School readiness	Children 3–5 accessing ECE	18.9%	DPE–UNICEF / MICS
School readiness	Children not developmentally on track	25.5%	DPE–UNICEF / MICS
Foundations	Grade 5 Bangla proficiency	~44%	NSA 2017
Foundations	Grade 5 mathematics proficiency	~35% → ~30%	NSA 2017–2022
Foundations	Early grade skill failure (Grades 3–5)	~50%	Education Watch
Progression	Grade 8 math/science competence	<40%	NASS
Progression	Cumulative dropout by Grade 10	>30%	BANBEIS 2023
Classroom practice	Rote-dominated instruction	Majority	Education Watch
Classroom practice	Lessons with feedback	<30%	Education Watch
Teacher availability	Absence (unannounced)	15–25%	Education Watch
Staffing	PTR >40:1	Widespread	BANBEIS 2023
Staffing	Subject-teacher shortages	Concentrated in disadvantaged areas	BANBEIS 2023
Curriculum pressure	Transition shock (Grades 6–8)	Sharp increase in abstraction without bridging or remediation	White Paper; Task Force
System response	Post-COVID curriculum reprioritisation	Minimal	White Paper; Task Force

Table A1.1 Evidence on learning foundations, classroom constraints, and progression

Taken together, the evidence shows that curriculum design and pacing are misaligned with classroom realities across the school cycle. Dense syllabi, abrupt transitions in cognitive demand, shortages of subject-qualified teachers, and limited flexibility to adapt content to student readiness reinforce instructional practices that prioritise coverage over mastery. These pressures accumulate across grades, making it increasingly difficult for students who fall behind to recover as they progress through the system

A1.5 Summary of key diagnostic findings

1. Learning deficits begin before school entry.

A majority of children enter Grade 1 without consistent exposure to structured early learning. Pre-primary access remains limited relative to cohort size, and utilisation is substantially lower than policy availability, producing wide variation in school readiness at the point of entry.

1. Foundational learning outcomes remain persistently weak.

Fewer than half of students achieve grade-level literacy, and roughly one-third achieve grade-level numeracy, by the end of primary school. These outcomes have shown little improvement across successive national assessment cycles, indicating a structural rather than transitional problem.

1. Learning gaps widen rather than close as students progress.

Weak foundations at the end of primary school are not remediated in lower secondary education. Grade 8 assessment evidence shows continued underperformance in mathematics and science, particularly on tasks requiring reasoning rather than recall, coinciding with rising dropout.

1. Grade progression frequently occurs without mastery.

Students advance through key transition points despite significant learning gaps. By higher secondary level, many students who pass public examinations lack readiness in analytical writing, problem-solving, and independent learning, revealing a growing divergence between credentials and actual competence.

1. Classroom instruction is constrained by incentives and conditions.

Teaching practice is dominated by syllabus coverage and rote methods, while effective instructional time is substantially lower than scheduled time due to teacher absence, administrative burden, large class sizes, and multi-grade teaching. These constraints make mastery-oriented instruction difficult to sustain.

1. Curriculum design and pacing are misaligned with classroom realities.

Dense syllabi, limited prioritisation of foundational competencies, and sharp increases in abstraction at lower secondary level place sustained pressure on teachers and students. Post-pandemic reinstatement of curricula without systematic reprioritisation has reinforced surface learning strategies.

1. Teacher supply and deployment constraints amplify learning gaps. High pupil– teacher ratios and shortages of subject-qualified teachers (particularly in mathematics, science, and English in rural and disadvantaged areas) reduce instructional attention and make curriculum transitions harder to manage.

A2 Assessment, credentials, and learning signals

Assessment is the main mechanism through which Bangladesh’s education system allocates progression and opportunity. Public examinations shape not only transitions between levels, but also the daily behaviour of teachers, students, school leaders, and households. The evidence reviewed here shows that the system’s assessment signals have been weakened by a combination of grade inflation, integrity failures, and a growing reliance on household expenditure to manage risk. These dynamics encourage credential seeking over mastery and reduce the extent to which exam results can be interpreted as stable evidence of learning.

A2.1 Signal dilution through grade inflation and divergence from learning evidence

A central diagnostic problem is the growing separation between examination outcomes and independent measures of learning. The National Student Assessment 2022 reports that ~50% of Grade 5 students are “proficient and above” in Bangla, while only ~30% of Grade 5 students are “proficient and above” in mathematics. These levels are not consistent with a system in which most students are mastering grade-level competencies.

In contrast, public examination indicators have historically presented a much more optimistic picture. The White Paper documents a long-run increase in SSC success and top grades, noting that the average SSC pass rate rose from 35.22% (2001) to 83.04% (2024), while the number of students securing GPA-5 increased to 1,63,845 (2024). These figures illustrate a steep improvement in credentials over time, but they sit alongside persistently low proficiency measured independently by NSA, particularly in mathematics.

This divergence matters because it weakens the interpretability of results. When formal exam outcomes rise sharply while independently measured proficiency remains modest, grades become less reliable signals of mastery. That uncertainty then becomes a system driver in its own right, shaping how households and schools respond.

A2.2 The 2025 SSC and HSC “correction” and what it reveals about discretion

Recent examination cycles show how sensitive outcomes can be to decisions about marking stringency, moderation, and enforcement. In SSC 2025, national reporting indicates a sharp fall in outcomes compared with the previous year. The pass rate fell to 68.45% and GPA-5 fell to 139,032, compared with 83.03% pass rate and 182,129 GPA-5 in 2024. The same pattern appears at the higher secondary level. For HSC 2025, bdnews24 reports a pass rate of 58.83% and 69,097 GPA-5, compared with 77.78% pass rate and 145,911 GPA-5 in 2024, implying an

18.95 percentage point year-on-year drop in pass rates and a decline of 76,814 in GPA-5 recipients.

Analytically, this volatility is important for diagnosis. A shift of this scale cannot plausibly be explained by changes in curriculum or classroom instruction within a single year. It indicates that examination outcomes are highly responsive to administrative discretion and enforcement regimes. This does not remove learning as the underlying problem. It instead shows that the public examination system has been capable of producing very different headline outcomes under different rules of stringency, which reinforces the broader concern about the stability and credibility of assessment signals.

A2.3 Integrity failures and weak credibility of the exam system

A second diagnostic problem is that assessment credibility is repeatedly undermined by integrity failures. The White Paper contains a dedicated discussion of “Question paper Leakage in Public Exams” and notes that the tendency allegedly became rampant after 2014, including regular leakage claims involving public examinations and admission tests. While the White Paper discussion is not primarily presented as a statistical series, it clearly treats leakage as recurrent rather than exceptional and ties it to systemic vulnerabilities (paper setting, distribution, intermediaries, and weak accountability).

The Task Force Report is more prescriptive but diagnostic in what it implies. It explicitly calls for ending “auto pass” provisions and for stopping question paper leaks, stating that “no auto pass should be allowed” and pointing to the need for action against those involved in leakage.

This is a strong signal that system actors view integrity and enforcement weaknesses as sufficiently serious to warrant explicit prohibition, not incremental adjustment.

Where integrity is uncertain, households and schools rationally treat examinations as high- stakes contests with uncertain rules, rather than as credible measurement. This is one of the mechanisms through which the system shifts away from learning and toward risk management.

A2.4 Political economy of assessment: discretion, shadow markets, and signal control

The assessment system does not only measure learning. It organises incentives, distributes advantage, and creates opportunities for extraction where stakes are high and governance is weak. The diagnostic evidence suggests three mechanisms that matter for system behaviour.

First, examination outcomes have been demonstrably sensitive to choices about marking stringency, moderation, and enforcement. Large year-to-year shifts in pass rates and top grades are analytically difficult to reconcile with gradual changes in classroom instruction. The more plausible interpretation is that administrative discretion has been able to expand or tighten success thresholds, which weakens the credibility of results as stable learning signals and increases uncertainty for households. This discretion did not operate in an informational vacuum. Independent assessments, employer feedback, and sector reviews consistently indicated weak mastery, yet enforcement choices repeatedly favoured visible stability over learning credibility.

Second, where credibility is weak and stakes remain high, a parallel “shadow assessment” economy grows. The White Paper identifies the way question leakage and compromised integrity interact with coaching and guidebook markets, including a reported nexus between question setters and coaching centres, and the downstream role of guides and private coaching as strategies for managing a high-risk contest rather than building mastery. In such conditions, tutoring functions less as enrichment and more as insurance.

Third, these dynamics create a self-protecting equilibrium. If high-stakes assessment remains the dominant pathway to progression, and if system credibility is periodically threatened, the political and institutional incentive is often to restore visible stability through controllable outputs rather than confront the harder work of rebuilding assessment integrity and classroom learning. This strengthens a cycle in which learning remains secondary to signal management, and households rationally increase private spend.

This political economy framing is not an allegation about every actor. It is a description of the incentive landscape that emerges when high-stakes signals, weak credibility, and discretionary enforcement coexist. It also helps explain why reforms that aim to reduce examination dominance often face organised resistance from groups whose income, influence, or legitimacy depends on the old regime.

A2.5 Household risk management: private coaching as a shadow assessment system

The weakening of assessment signals is reflected most clearly in household behaviour. When examination outcomes become volatile, inflated, or weakly linked to demonstrated learning, households respond by treating formal assessment as a high-stakes risk event rather than a

reliable measure of mastery. Private tutoring and coaching emerge in this context as a shadow assessment system that households use to manage uncertainty.

Education Watch data illustrate the scale of this response. In 2022, average annual household expenditure on education was BDT 13,882 for primary students and BDT 27,340 for secondary students, with private tutoring and coaching forming the single largest cost component in both cases. In the first six months of 2023 alone, households had already spent 62 per cent (primary) and 83 per cent (secondary) of their previous full-year education expenditure, indicating rapidly rising investment in examination preparation.

Analytically, these patterns are best understood as risk insurance. When grading standards, moderation practices, and enforcement regimes shift from year to year, households cannot infer future outcomes from past performance. Tutoring therefore becomes a hedge against uncertainty, designed to secure credentials under unpredictable assessment conditions rather than to complement classroom learning.

This behaviour reinforces credential-seeking over mastery. Coaching aligns tightly to anticipated examination formats, marking schemes, and question patterns, further narrowing the curriculum and strengthening rote strategies. Over time, this weakens the signalling function of examinations even further, creating a feedback loop in which assessment instability drives greater private investment, which in turn entrenches teaching to the test.

The implications for assessment credibility are profound. When progression increasingly depends on private risk management rather than demonstrable learning, public examinations lose their role as transparent, system-wide signals of competence. The financing and equity consequences of this shift are examined separately in A1.4.

Diagnostic domain	Indicator	Magnitude / pattern	Source
Learning signal at end of primary	Grade 5 Bangla proficiency (“proficient and above”)	~50% of students	National Student Assessment 2022
Learning signal at end of primary	Grade 5 mathematics proficiency (“proficient and above”)	~30% of students	National Student Assessment 2022
Credential expansion over time	SSC average pass rate	Increased from 35.22% (2001) to 83.04% (2024)	Education White Paper
Top-grade expansion	SSC GPA-5 recipients	1,63,845 students in 2024	Education White Paper
Signal divergence	Exam outcomes vs independent learning	Credentials rise while mastery remains modest	NSA; White Paper (triangulated)
Examination volatility (SSC)	SSC pass rate and GPA-5 count	Pass rate 68.45%; GPA-5 139,032 in 2025, sharp decline from 2024	Ministry Admin Data
Examination volatility (HSC)	HSC pass rate and GPA-5 count	Pass rate 58.83%; GPA-5 69,097 in 2025 (–18.95 pp YoY)	Ministry Admin Data
Administrative discretion	Sensitivity of outcomes to enforcement	Large year-on-year swings under different marking regimes	Media synthesis; policy analysis
Integrity risk	Question paper leakage	Treated as recurrent, system-level problem	Education White Paper

Enforcement weakness	Auto-pass provisions	Explicit call to abolish auto pass	Task Force Report
Household risk response	Primary education expenditure	BDT 13,882 annually; tutoring largest cost item	Education Watch 2023
Household risk response	Secondary education expenditure	BDT 27,340 annually; tutoring dominant	Education Watch 2023
Cost acceleration	Six-month expenditure vs annual (secondary)	83% of previous full-year cost spent in six months	Education Watch 2023
Shadow assessment system	Role of private coaching	Coaching functions as progression insurance under weak signals	Education Watch; triangulated

Table A1.2 Evidence on assessment, credentials, and learning signals

A2.6 Summary of key diagnostic findings

1. Assessment signals are weakly aligned with actual learning.

Independent assessments show modest mastery by the end of primary school, particularly in mathematics, placing a hard constraint on what public examination results can credibly signal about student competence.

1. Credentials have expanded faster than learning.

Public examination outcomes, including pass rates and top grades, have risen sharply over time despite persistently weak proficiency measured independently, creating a widening gap between credentials and mastery.

1. Examination outcomes are highly sensitive to administrative discretion.

The sharp year-to-year swings observed in SSC and HSC results indicate that marking, moderation, and enforcement regimes exert a strong influence on outcomes, undermining result stability.

1. Integrity failures further weaken credibility.

Recurrent concerns around question leakage and the repeated re-emergence of “auto pass” provisions indicate systemic vulnerabilities in examination governance rather than isolated incidents.

1. Households respond rationally to weak signals through private risk management.

As assessment reliability declines, households increasingly invest in tutoring and coaching as insurance against uncertainty, treating examinations as high-stakes risk events rather than transparent measures of learning.

1. Private coaching reinforces credentialism over mastery.

Coaching aligns tightly to examination formats and marking schemes, narrowing learning and further weakening the signalling value of public assessments, creating a self-reinforcing cycle.

A3 Governance failures, incentives, and resource leakages in education delivery

Evidence across national reviews, administrative data, and field-based studies indicates that governance failures materially constrain the conversion of education spending into learning. These failures are not episodic. They reflect incentive structures that tolerate leakage, weaken enforcement, and prioritise procedural compliance over instructional performance.

A3.1 Fragmented authority and weak horizontal accountability

Bangladesh’s education system is governed through multiple ministries, directorates, and boards, with limited coordination at delivery level. The White Paper documents that curriculum, textbooks, assessment, teacher management, and supervision are administered through separate institutional chains, reducing coherence between what is taught, assessed, and monitored.

The Consultation Committee Report notes that local government bodies and school management committees have no formal authority over teacher discipline, transfers, or performance appraisal, limiting their ability to hold schools accountable for learning outcomes. Oversight therefore flows upward, through reporting and audits, rather than outward to parents, communities, or peer institutions, resulting in weak and uneven horizontal accountability for learning. Notably, the district and upazila levels operate primarily as transmission and reporting nodes rather than as empowered problem-solving tiers, limiting their ability to diagnose learning issues locally or adapt responses in real time.

Evidence from recent governance analysis of primary schools reinforces this diagnosis. A recent study by BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD) 5 on primary school governance shows that the vertical governance structure involves multiple actors with overlapping but incomplete authority, creating fragmentation and diffusion of responsibility. Formal monitoring is dominated by reporting and procedural compliance, while verification of actual school-level conditions is limited. The study finds that where informal horizontal checks exist, such as community scrutiny or third-party verification, governance quality improves through increased visibility and reputational pressure. However, these mechanisms operate unevenly and cannot substitute for system-wide accountability arrangements.

As a result, accountability is largely procedural. Schools and local offices are incentivised to submit complete reports on time, but face limited consequences for persistent underperformance in attendance, instructional quality, or learning outcomes.

A3.2 Resource leakage at school level

The most detailed empirical evidence on leakage comes from the joint study by BIGD and SOAS University6 on resource leakages in government primary schools. Based on intensive fieldwork in ten government primary schools, the study documents systematic inflation of enrolment figures, diversion of school grants, and informal payments linked to access to funds.

In sampled schools, reported enrolment exceeded observed regular attendance by around 10 per cent on average, with higher discrepancies in schools located near private institutions where students were formally registered but not regularly present. While the study is not nationally representative, similar concerns are recorded in consultation findings and Education Watch observations, suggesting that weak enrolment verification is not isolated.

Misuse of School Level Improvement Plan (SLIP) funds is also documented. The BIGD-SOAS study records inflated procurement costs and informal deductions at multiple points in the disbursement chain. The Task Force Report corroborates these concerns by explicitly calling

5 BIGD. (2025). Primary school governance in Bangladesh. Dhaka: BIGD.

6 BIGD & SOAS. (2025). Resource leakages in primary schools in Bangladesh: Do horizontal checks have an effect on the quality of governance? Dhaka and London: BIGD & SOAS.

for stronger financial oversight and transparency at school level, indicating that such practices are recognised as systemic.

A3.3 Teacher effort, absenteeism, and low-powered incentives

Teacher effort represents one of the most direct channels through which governance affects learning. Education Watch unannounced school visits consistently report teacher absence rates in the range of 15 to 25 per cent, with higher absence in rural and disadvantaged locations.

The BIGD-SOAS study provides explanatory context for these patterns. It documents irregular supervision, limited sanctions, and the role of political or social connections in insulating teachers from consequences. Where promotion and career progression are largely seniority- based, the marginal return to instructional effort is low.

The White Paper confirms that teacher appraisal systems focus primarily on attendance records and qualifications, with limited linkage to classroom performance or student learning. Head teachers, according to the Consultation Committee Report, have restricted authority to discipline staff or reallocate teaching responsibilities, further weakening incentives for consistent effort.

A3.4 Supervision, discretion, and enforcement gaps

Formal supervision mechanisms exist at scale, but evidence indicates that their impact is limited. The Consultation Committee Report notes that supervisory visits often prioritise checklist compliance and data verification rather than instructional observation or corrective action. This pattern is reinforced by the ASPR for 2022 and 2023, which document persistent and recurrent gaps between planned activities and actual implementation at school and upazila levels. Despite high reported completion of administrative targets, the ASPR highlights uneven supervision coverage, limited follow-up on monitoring findings, and weak linkage between identified problems and corrective action. These findings support the conclusion that governance systems generate information but do not reliably translate it into instructional improvement.

BANBEIS and directorate systems collect extensive administrative data, yet these data are primarily used for upward reporting rather than local problem-solving. As a result, weak performance is documented but not made visible in ways that trigger action, peer scrutiny, or local correction. Where underperformance is identified, responses typically involve additional reporting requirements or centrally designed programmes rather than targeted enforcement or support.

This creates high discretion with low consequence. When learning problems remain largely invisible beyond compliance reports, rules exist, but their application is uneven, and sanctions for non-compliance are uncertain. In such an environment, effort reduction and rent-seeking become rational and stabilised responses.

A3.5 Political incentives and outcome management

Political incentives shape which education outcomes are treated as achievements and which are treated as tolerable costs. Across reform cycles, visible outputs such as enrolment

expansion, infrastructure delivery, stipend coverage, and headline examination results have carried clear political value. Learning outcomes have carried less immediate reward, particularly when they require confrontation with entrenched interests, enforcement costs, or credibility risks.

The White Paper documents the long-run rise in public examination success rates and top grades alongside persistent evidence of weak mastery measured independently. It also discusses recurrent integrity failures, including question leakage, and links these vulnerabilities to systemic weaknesses in governance. The Task Force Report’s explicit calls to end “auto pass” provisions and stop question leakage further imply that credibility problems are not incidental, and that they have required repeated reassertion at senior policy levels.

Analytically, the key issue is enforcement asymmetry. Where the system is able to enforce compliance and reporting, those behaviours become reliable. Where the system is less able or less willing to enforce learning integrity and sanction malpractice consistently, those domains become discretionary. Discretion, in turn, creates both uncertainty and opportunity. It strengthens risk management by households, it expands shadow markets, and it discourages bureaucratic dissent when speaking plainly is costly and follow-through is uneven.

This pattern is consistent with an equilibrium in which outcome management becomes a rational political strategy, and administrative caution becomes a rational bureaucratic strategy, even as learning evidence deteriorates.

A3.6 Governance as an equilibrium

Across reports, a consistent picture emerges. Governance failures persist not because actors lack awareness, but because incentive structures normalise certain behaviours. Where enforcement is weak, discretion is high, and outcomes are politically sensitive, practices such as enrolment inflation, fund leakage, and reduced effort become stable equilibrium responses.

Instances of stronger performance are often associated with informal horizontal accountability, such as active community pressure or influential local actors. However, these conditions are uneven and cannot be relied upon as a system-wide solution.

A3.7 Summary of key diagnostic findings

1. Governance arrangements prioritise procedural compliance over learning accountability.

Oversight systems emphasise reporting and formal processes, while accountability for instructional quality and learning outcomes remains weak.

1. Authority is fragmented across multiple actors with incomplete mandates. Overlapping institutional responsibilities diffuse accountability and weaken vertical coherence, limiting the system’s capacity to enforce standards consistently.
2. Horizontal accountability mechanisms are weak and uneven.

Local government bodies, school management committees, and communities have limited formal authority, resulting in minimal peer or community pressure for learning performance.

1. Resource allocation is distorted by weak verification.

Enrolment inflation and limited attendance verification lead to misallocation of funds at school level, weakening the link between resources and actual service delivery.

1. Teacher effort is governed by low-powered incentives.

Absenteeism and reduced instructional effort persist where supervision is irregular, sanctions are weak, and promotion is largely seniority-based.

1. Enforcement gaps normalise leakage and underperformance.

When rules exist but consequences are uncertain, effort reduction and informal extraction become rational equilibrium behaviours.

1. Political incentives favour visible outcomes over substantive learning.

Emphasis on enrolment, infrastructure, and headline examination results encourages outcome management while deferring structural learning problems.

A4 Education financing, expenditure efficiency, and resource leakages

Education financing shapes what the system can deliver, but also how the system behaves. Where spending is low, rigid, and absorbed by recurrent costs, schools and local offices have limited discretionary capacity to address learning gaps. Where allocation and utilisation are weakly linked to performance, and where leakage occurs, additional spending does not reliably translate into improved instruction. The evidence across multiple reports and studies suggests that Bangladesh faces a dual constraint. Public education spending is low relative to stated ambitions, and the spending that does occur is not consistently converted into learning because incentives, discretion, and accountability are misaligned. The binding constraint is therefore not funding alone, but the way financing interacts with incentives, verification, and accountability to shape behaviour across the system.

A4.1 Low spending relative to ambition and international benchmarks

The White Paper reports that public education spending as a share of GDP has not shown a progressive trend, and notes a decline in the education budget share of GDP from 1.9 per cent to 1.69 per cent in FY2025. The same section links this to underachievement against national targets and highlights the mismatch between ambition and fiscal commitment.

The White Paper also explicitly references international benchmarks under the Education 2030 Framework for Action, stating that it recommends countries allocate 4–6 per cent of GDP to education, and notes that Bangladesh is “way behind” that benchmark. Further it shows that that education’s share of the total budget fluctuates around the low teens, with values in the range of approximately 10.4 to 14 per cent across the period shown

A4.2 Composition and rigidity of public spending

Beyond the level of spending, the composition of spending constrains learning investment. The White Paper notes a “budget utilisation bias towards non-development expenditure” and reports that actual non-development spending has been significantly greater than development expenditure in education over the period discussed. This matters because non-development spending is typically salary and routine administration, which is necessary but leaves limited fiscal room for learning materials, teacher coaching, remediation supports, or school-level problem-solving.

The Task Force Report reinforces this diagnosis through its discussion of budget allocation and teacher incentives. It includes a figure on ministry and division-wise education sector allocation, drawing on budget briefs between 2021–24. The figure shows multiple allocation

values for the Ministry of Primary and Mass Education and the Secondary and Higher Education Division and then links low teacher salary to motivation and private tutoring, stating that primary and secondary teacher salaries are among the lowest in South-East Asia.

This combination of low overall spending, salary-heavy composition, and limited discretion reduces the system’s ability to finance learning improvement as a routine function rather than as time-bound projects.

A4.3 Expenditure efficiency and leakage in delivery chains

Even where funds exist, evidence indicates that resources do not reliably reach intended learning uses. The BIGD–SOAS study on resource leakages in primary schools, multiple leakage mechanisms in government primary schooling, including enrolment inflation and diversion of school grants are identified. In the study’s sampled schools, the report documents that recorded enrolment exceeded observed regular attendance by around 10 per cent on average, indicating systematic incentives to over-report enrolment where enrolment-linked resources or benefits exist. The study also documents irregularities in the use of school-level funds, including inflated procurement and informal deductions at multiple points in the chain.

This is not only a “corruption” story. It is a fiscal efficiency story. When monitoring focuses on paperwork rather than verification, and when sanctions are uncertain, leakage becomes a rational equilibrium response for actors who face low risk of enforcement and high upside from informal extraction.

The Consultation Committee Report supports the institutional logic behind these patterns by documenting constraints on enforcement and school-level authority, including the limits on local accountability mechanisms and the strong upward compliance orientation. In this environment, increased spending without governance reform can increase the size of the pool available for leakage without increasing learning.

A4.4 Cost shifting to households and the rise of private financing

Private tutoring and coaching also reveal a deeper financing problem: the progressive transfer of the effective cost of learning and progression from the public system to households. Where public spending is low, rigid, and weakly linked to learning outcomes, families increasingly finance the conditions needed to progress through schooling.

Education Watch provides clear evidence of this shift. In 2022, households spent on average BDT 13,882 per year on primary education and BDT 27,340 on secondary education, with tutoring and coaching accounting for the largest share of expenditure in both cases. By mid- 2023, household education spending had already reached levels equivalent to 62 per cent of the previous year’s total for primary students and 83 per cent for secondary students, implying sharp real increases in private costs.

This pattern indicates more than supplementary spending. It reflects a de facto privatisation of progression, in which households purchase learning time, examination preparation, and academic support that the public system is unable to deliver reliably. As a result, the financial burden of securing educational outcomes is shifted away from the state and onto families.

The consequences are structural. When progression depends on household expenditure, public schooling becomes less able to function as an equalising institution. Students from wealthier households are better positioned to compensate for weak instruction, large class sizes, and limited remediation, while poorer households face higher risks of falling behind despite formal access to schooling.

This cost shifting also feeds back into system behaviour. Teachers facing low salaries and weak incentives may rationally allocate effort toward private tutoring markets. Schools adapt to parental demand for coaching-oriented instruction. Over time, these responses normalise a dual system in which public provision covers credentials in name, while households finance the conditions needed to achieve them in practice.

Seen in this light, rising private expenditure is not an anomaly but a predictable response to low public investment combined with weak accountability for learning. Without changes to how public financing is allocated, verified, and linked to outcomes, additional household spending is likely to continue substituting for, rather than complementing, public education delivery.

A4.5 Financing as a behavioural signal

Financing does not only provide inputs. It signals what is rewarded. Low public spending combined with weak verification and weak linkage to learning outcomes signals that compliance, credentials, and administrative performance matter more than learning. Household responses then become rational. Families invest in tutoring as risk management. Teachers respond to low salary and low-powered incentives by shifting effort toward private tutoring markets. Local systems adapt to weak enforcement by normalising leakage and informal payments. Over time, these behaviours become stabilised and difficult to reverse without changes to both fiscal levels and the incentive architecture through which funds are allocated, used, and verified.

A4.6 Summary of key diagnostic findings

1. Public education spending remains low relative to ambition.

Education expenditure as a share of GDP has stagnated or declined, falling well below international benchmarks referenced in national policy frameworks.

1. Spending composition limits learning investment.

A persistent bias toward non-development expenditure constrains fiscal space for instructional improvement, remediation, and school-level problem-solving.

1. Higher spending does not automatically translate into better learning.

Where finance is weakly linked to performance and verification is limited, additional resources are absorbed by recurrent commitments rather than improving instruction.

1. Leakage reflects fiscal inefficiency as much as corruption.

Enrolment inflation, procurement irregularities, and weak oversight persist where monitoring prioritises paperwork over verification.

1. Households increasingly finance progression through private expenditure. Tutoring and coaching have become the dominant components of household education spending, effectively shifting the cost of learning from the public system to families.

1. Cost shifting amplifies inequality.

Students from wealthier households can compensate for weak public provision, while poorer households face higher risks of falling behind despite formal access.

1. Financing arrangements shape behaviour across the system.

Low public investment combined with weak accountability signals that credentials matter more than learning, reinforcing tutoring markets, leakage, and credentialism.

A5 Equity and inclusion

Bangladesh has achieved near-universal access to schooling at early stages, yet participation, learning, and progression remain unevenly distributed across socioeconomic groups, gender, geography, disability status, and language communities. Evidence across administrative data, household surveys, and consultation findings indicates that equity gaps are not confined to access alone. They reflect cumulative disadvantages that shape attendance, classroom experience, learning progression, and transition outcomes across the education lifecycle.

This section diagnoses the main dimensions through which inequity is produced and sustained within the education system.

A5.1 Poverty, household constraints, and uneven participation

Household income remains one of the strongest predictors of educational continuity and learning opportunity. Education Watch consistently reports that students from low-income households face higher risks of irregular attendance, repetition, and dropout, particularly beyond primary education. These risks are shaped not only by direct costs, but also by opportunity costs, household labour demands, and limited learning support at home (Education Watch, various rounds).

BANBEIS 2023 statistics show that while enrolment at primary level remains high nationally, dropout accelerates sharply at secondary level, with higher attrition among students from poorer households and marginal locations. Education Watch findings further indicate that learning outcomes differ substantially by wealth quintile, with students from poorer households significantly less likely to demonstrate grade-level literacy and numeracy by the end of primary school.

Rising household expenditure on education intensifies these inequities. As shown in A1.4, private tutoring and coaching constitute the largest share of household education spending, particularly at secondary level. Where households cannot afford supplementation, students are more likely to fall behind, reinforcing income-based learning gaps.

A5.2 Gender, adolescence, and dropout

Bangladesh has achieved and sustained gender parity in enrolment at primary level, and girls’ enrolment exceeds boys’ at early secondary levels. However, this parity does not translate into equitable progression through adolescence. BANBEIS 2023 statistics show that secondary dropout remains higher for girls than for boys, with cumulative dropout exceeding 30 per cent by Grade 10, and girls experiencing particularly sharp attrition between Grades 8 and 10.

Education Watch and the Consultation Committee Report identify multiple drivers of female dropout during adolescence, including early marriage, safety concerns, household responsibilities, and social norms that restrict mobility. While stipend programmes have supported enrolment, they have not fully addressed these structural constraints, particularly where schooling quality is perceived as low or where examination pressure increases household risk.

The White Paper notes that girls are overrepresented among youth who are not in education, employment, or training (NEET), particularly in the 15–24 age group, indicating that transition failures extend beyond schooling into labour market outcomes (White Paper). These patterns suggest that gendered disadvantage shifts form across the education lifecycle rather than disappearing.

A5.3 Geography, mobility, and marginal locations

Geographic location strongly conditions access to stable schooling and effective learning time. BANBEIS 2023 statistics show persistent disparities in class size, teacher availability, and infrastructure quality between urban centres and rural or hard-to-reach areas, including char, haor, and coastal regions.

Education Watch field studies report that students in urban informal settlements, char regions, and migration-prone households experience high levels of attendance irregularity. In some contexts, around one in four students is absent on a typical school day, reflecting seasonal migration, household instability, and labour demand. Urban poverty presents a distinct but comparable risk profile: despite physical proximity to schools, children in informal settlements experience overcrowded classrooms, unstable attendance, and weak instructional continuity, producing learning outcomes that are often no better than those in remote rural areas. Irregular attendance reduces cumulative instructional time and undermines progression, particularly for students with weak foundational skills.

Geographic inequities were amplified during the COVID-19 pandemic. Education Watch surveys conducted during school closures show that access to remote learning resources was substantially lower in rural areas and urban slums than in better-resourced urban households. Post-reopening assessments indicate slower learning recovery in these locations, reinforcing pre-existing gaps.

A5.4 Disability, language, and inclusion gaps

Children with disabilities face persistent barriers to participation and learning. BANBEIS 2023 statistics data indicate that a minority of schools have accessible infrastructure such as ramps, adapted toilets, or inclusive learning materials, and teacher training in inclusive pedagogy remains limited. Education Watch reports that children with disabilities are more likely to enrol late, attend irregularly, and drop out before completing primary education.

Language is another significant axis of exclusion. In multilingual areas, including the Chittagong Hill Tracts and other indigenous regions, many children begin school in Bangla despite not speaking it at home. The White Paper notes that early instruction in a non-home language reduces comprehension, confidence, and classroom participation, particularly in early grades. These early disadvantages carry forward into later learning stages, especially in mathematics and science where language demands increase.

The Consultation Committee Report emphasises that existing inclusion policies have not been systematically operationalised at classroom level. While frameworks exist for disability inclusion and mother-tongue instruction, implementation capacity, materials, and teacher support remain uneven, limiting their impact on actual learning conditions.

A5.5 Cumulative disadvantage and system-wide implications

Across these dimensions, inequity operates cumulatively rather than independently. Poverty interacts with geography; gender norms intersect with household constraints; disability and language barriers compound early learning gaps. As a result, students who begin school at a disadvantage are more likely to experience weaker instruction, irregular attendance, and higher examination risk, and less likely to benefit from private supplementation.

The evidence reviewed suggests that equity challenges in Bangladesh’s education system are not primarily about access. They are about differential exposure to effective learning conditions over time. Without targeted mechanisms to address these cumulative disadvantages, system- wide improvements in averages are unlikely to close persistent gaps.

A5.6 Summary of key diagnostic findings

1. Equity gaps extend beyond access to differential learning exposure.

Disparities are driven by differences in attendance stability, instructional quality, and cumulative learning time rather than enrolment alone.

1. Poverty shapes both participation and learning outcomes.

Low-income households face higher dropout risk and are less able to compensate for weak classroom instruction through private supplementation.

1. Gender parity in enrolment masks sharp adolescent dropout.

Girls experience disproportionate attrition during lower and upper secondary education, with disadvantages re-emerging during key transition points.

1. Geography strongly conditions learning opportunity.

Students in rural, hard-to-reach, and informal urban settlements experience larger classes, weaker staffing, and more irregular attendance.

1. Mobility and instability disrupt instructional continuity.

Migration-prone households and informal settlements face chronic disruptions that reduce cumulative learning time.

1. Disability and language barriers remain weakly addressed in practice.

Limited accessible infrastructure, uneven teacher preparation, and non-home language instruction constrain participation and comprehension.

1. Disadvantage accumulates across the education lifecycle.

Early gaps compound over time, making later remediation increasingly difficult and reinforcing intergenerational inequality.

A6 Education streams and stratification

Bangladesh’s education system is organised across multiple parallel streams, including general education, madrasah education, English-medium institutions, and technical and vocational education and training (TVET). While this diversity has expanded access and responded to varied social preferences, evidence indicates that the streams function as stratified pathways

rather than equivalent routes, producing systematically different learning conditions, credentials, and transition opportunities.

This section diagnoses how stream differentiation contributes to unequal preparation for examinations, further education, and employment.

A6.1 Size and distribution of education streams

BANBEIS 2023 statistics show that the general education stream enrols the majority of students, while madrasah education accounts for a substantial minority, particularly in rural areas. English-medium institutions enrol a relatively small share of students but are concentrated in urban centres and serve households with greater economic and social capital. TVET enrolment remains modest relative to general secondary education despite longstanding policy emphasis on skills development.

The White Paper notes that while multiple streams operate under national policy frameworks, coordination across streams is limited, and planning often occurs in parallel rather than through integrated mechanisms. This fragmentation affects curriculum alignment, assessment comparability, and student mobility between streams.

Planning, regulation, curriculum development, assessment, and certification across streams are overseen by separate authorities and boards, with limited coordination or shared accountability mechanisms. As a result, stream-level decisions are made largely in parallel rather than within a unified system logic, weakening vertical coherence and reducing the state’s ability to ensure equivalent learning expectations or pathways across streams.

A6.2 Differences in learning conditions and instructional quality

Evidence from Education Watch and national reviews indicates that learning conditions vary substantially across streams. Students in English-medium schools typically experience smaller class sizes, longer instructional time, and greater access to supplementary learning resources, including private tutoring. These conditions are associated with higher average proficiency, though outcomes within this stream are highly unequal and concentrated in a subset of elite institutions.

In contrast, many general education and madrasah schools operate with larger class sizes and more constrained instructional environments, particularly in rural and disadvantaged locations. BANBEIS 2023 statistics show that shortages of subject-qualified teachers in mathematics, science, and English are more prevalent in general and madrasah institutions outside major urban centres. Education Watch classroom observations indicate that rote-based instruction is common across these streams, with limited remediation or enrichment opportunities.

Madrasah education plays a crucial access role for many communities, yet curriculum balance differs. The White Paper and Task Force Report note that in many madrasahs, instructional time devoted to religious studies reduces exposure to science, mathematics, and English, particularly where staffing is limited. This affects preparedness for higher secondary science streams and tertiary education.

A6.3 Assessment alignment and credential differentiation

Assessment arrangements further reinforce stratification. While public examinations nominally apply across streams, preparation pathways differ. Students in English-medium schools often follow international curricula and sit separate examinations, while students in general and madrasah streams rely on national boards.

As shown in A1.2, public examination outcomes in general education have expanded over time, but learning mastery remains uneven. The Consultation Committee Report notes that credential comparability across streams is limited, and that employers and tertiary institutions often treat qualifications from different streams differently, regardless of formal equivalence

These dynamics weaken the signalling value of credentials and increase reliance on informal screening, coaching, or institutional reputation, which advantages students from better- resourced streams.

A6.4 TVET pathways and constrained upward mobility

TVET programmes are intended to provide applied skills and faster entry into employment, yet enrolment remains low relative to general secondary education. BANBEIS 2023 statistics indicate that TVET accounts for a small share of secondary-level enrolment, and participation is uneven across regions.

The Task Force Report notes that while some TVET graduates transition successfully into work, pathways from TVET into higher education or higher-productivity employment are not consistently articulated, limiting upward mobility. Where TVET is perceived as a terminal track rather than a flexible pathway, it attracts fewer high-performing students, reinforcing its lower status.

A6.5 Private supplementation and stream reinforcement

Household behaviour further entrenches stream stratification. Education Watch data show that access to private tutoring and coaching is substantially higher among students in general and English-medium schools than among madrasah or TVET students. As tutoring increasingly functions as a parallel system for learning and examination preparation, streams with greater access to private supplementation gain further advantage.

This dynamic shifts stratification from formal policy design to household capacity to pay. Over time, it amplifies inequalities in learning, examination performance, and transitions, even when formal access is nominally open.

A6.6 Limited horizontal and vertical mobility

Evidence across reports suggests that mobility between streams is limited. Transitions from madrasah to general education or from TVET to higher secondary or tertiary education are possible in principle, but face curricular mismatches, assessment barriers, and institutional gatekeeping (White Paper; Consultation Committee Report).

As a result, early stream placement has long-term consequences. Students who enter less- resourced streams with weaker learning conditions face increasing difficulty moving into higher-status pathways later, even when motivation and ability are present.

A6.7 Summary of key diagnostic findings

• Education streams function as stratified pathways rather than equivalent routes. Parallel systems produce systematically different learning conditions, credentials, and transition opportunities.
• Stream governance is fragmented and weakly coordinated.

Separate authorities oversee curriculum, assessment, and certification, reducing vertical coherence and comparability across pathways.

• Learning conditions differ sharply by stream.

English-medium institutions offer smaller classes and greater supplementation, while general and madrasah streams face more constrained environments.

• TVET remains marginal and weakly linked to upward mobility.

Limited scale and unclear pathways into higher education or skilled employment reinforce its lower status.

• Assessment and credential signalling vary across streams.

Formal equivalence masks informal differentiation by employers and tertiary institutions.

• Private tutoring reinforces stream advantages.

Household ability to pay increasingly determines learning and examination outcomes, intensifying stratification.

• Mobility between streams is limited.

Early placement has long-term consequences, with institutional and curricular barriers constraining later movement.

A7 Conclusion: Why learning has not followed schooling

Appendix A set out to explain a central paradox in Bangladesh’s education system: sustained expansion in access and credentials has not translated into consistent gains in learning. The evidence reviewed across learning assessments, assessment behaviour, governance arrangements, financing patterns, and household responses shows that this disconnect is not the result of isolated implementation failures. It reflects a stable equilibrium in which incentives, institutions, and behaviours interact in ways that reproduce weak learning outcomes over time.

At the centre of this equilibrium is misalignment between what the system measures, what it rewards, and what it can credibly enforce. Students progress through grades without secure mastery because curriculum pacing, assessment signals, and classroom realities are weakly aligned. Public examinations, rather than functioning as reliable measures of competence, have become vulnerable to integrity failures and administrative discretion, encouraging credential- seeking behaviour by schools and risk management by households. Governance systems prioritise procedural compliance and upward reporting, while accountability for instructional quality and learning remains diffuse. Financing is low, rigid, and weakly linked to verified learning improvement, which accelerates cost shifting to families and amplifies inequality. Parallel education streams further stratify opportunity, with limited mobility once pathways diverge.

These dynamics reinforce one another. Weak assessment credibility expands private tutoring markets. Private tutoring reshapes teaching practice and parental expectations. Weak governance and low-powered incentives make effort reduction and leakage rational for some actors, while fear of speaking plainly becomes rational for others. Over time, the system’s most reliable consequences attach to controllable outputs, not learning integrity. In such a system, underperformance is not aberrant. It is predictable.

This predictability reflects not only institutional inertia but repeated choices about what is politically valuable, what is administratively feasible, and what is allowed to persist. The diagnosis therefore identifies binding constraints that recur across subsystems: weak learning signals, fragmented authority, enforcement asymmetry, low-powered incentives, limited protected instructional time, cost shifting to households, and stratified pathways with limited mobility. Addressing any one of these in isolation is unlikely to shift outcomes.

Appendix A provides the empirical and analytical foundation for the Vision and the National Learning Implementation Framework. It clarifies not only what is not working, but why, and therefore where reform effort must concentrate to move the system from schooling expansion to sustained learning improvement.

Appendix B: The Feedback Architecture of Bangladesh’s Education System

B1. Purpose and scope

This appendix sets out the feedback architecture that explains why Bangladesh’s education system behaves as it does, why weak learning outcomes persist despite repeated reform efforts, and where leverage for change lies. It is designed to be readable as a standalone chapter. A reader should be able to start here and understand the system logic without needing to have read Chapters 1 – 4, while still seeing clearly how this appendix underpins the system diagnosis in Chapter 3 and the learning journey in Chapter 4.

Education systems do not behave randomly. They produce recognisable patterns over time because they are organised through structures, incentives, information flows, and relationships that generate particular forms of behaviour. These patterns are sustained through feedback processes that link actions in one part of the system to responses in another, often with delays that obscure cause and effect (Meadows, 2008; Sterman, 2000). Understanding these feedback processes is essential for explaining why some reforms gain traction while others fade, and why effort alone is insufficient to change outcomes.

A feedback loop describes how a change reinforces or moderates itself over time. Reinforcing feedback strengthens a direction of change, allowing learning gains to accumulate or deterioration to compound. Balancing feedback stabilises behaviour by dampening change, sometimes productively and sometimes in ways that protect ineffective routines. Systems behave as they do not because of stated intentions, but because of the feedback structures that govern how information, incentives, and risk circulate through the system (Meadows, 2008).

This appendix maps approximately thirty recurring loops that, taken together, constitute a practical model of Bangladesh’s education system behaviour. These loops are not exhaustive, nor are they unique to Bangladesh. They are structural patterns that recur across evidence and explain observed outcomes. The aim is not to claim that every school is the same, but to explain why familiar system-wide patterns reappear even when local effort is high.

B2. Analytical lenses and an anchoring example

This appendix analyses Bangladesh’s education system using three complementary analytical lenses: systems thinking, behavioural realism, and adaptive governance. These lenses clarify how the system is being interpreted before the feedback architecture is presented. Without this framing, complex system behaviour is often misread as technical abstraction, or as a critique of individual actors. The argument here is different: outcomes persist because the system is structured in ways that generate predictable patterns of behaviour over time (Meadows, 2008; Sterman, 2000).

Lens 1: Systems thinking – outcomes emerge from feedback structure Lens 2: Behavioural realism – actors adapt rationally to incentives and risk

Lens 3: Adaptive governance – reform succeeds when the system can learn and adjust safely

B2.1 Lens 1: Systems thinking

Systems thinking treats education not as a linear delivery chain, but as a complex system composed of interacting parts. Cause and effect are often separated in time and space.

Decisions taken in curriculum design, assessment rules, or administrative accountability can shape classroom behaviour years later, in ways that are not immediately visible to decision- makers (Sterman, 2000). Large investments can coexist with weak learning if the underlying feedback structure remains unchanged. Conversely, relatively small structural shifts can generate disproportionate effects when they alter how feedback and incentives work (Meadows, 2008).

B2.2 Lens 2: Behavioural realism

Behavioural realism begins from a simple premise. Teachers, officials, students, and families generally behave in ways that are sensible given the incentives, risks, and signals they face. Behaviour adapts to consequences, not to intentions (Simon, 1957; March and Olsen, 1989). In high-stakes, low-trust environments, risk avoidance becomes rational. When rewards for improving learning are uncertain and costs of deviation are high, actors prioritise behaviours that are safer, more visible, or more predictable. Reforms that assume actors will behave differently without changing the conditions they face tend to be absorbed (Pritchett, 2015).

B2.3 Lens 3: Adaptive governance

Adaptive governance recognises that education systems operate under uncertainty, fragmentation, and political constraint. Authority is distributed, information is imperfect, and control is partial. Reform therefore cannot succeed through blueprint design alone (Andrews, Pritchett and Woolcock, 2017). Systems improve when they can learn from their own experience. That requires feedback that is timely, credible, and safe to act on. It also requires sequencing, because some conditions must be stabilised before others can be strengthened. In contexts like Bangladesh, reforms that raise stakes without first strengthening credibility and trust often trigger defensive behaviour rather than improvement (Heifetz, Grashow and Linsky, 2009; OECD, 2017).

B2.4 Anchoring example: why learning does not automatically follow schooling

Over the past two decades, schooling in Bangladesh expanded rapidly. Classrooms were built, enrolment increased, and examination participation rose. From a linear perspective, learning should have improved as a result.

A systems view explains why that did not follow automatically. Expansion changed some visible parts of the system while leaving key behavioural drivers largely intact. The incentive logic inside classrooms remained anchored in examination pressure. Administrative accountability remained anchored in compliance and reporting. Feedback from learning evidence to day-to-day practice remained weak.

A behavioural view explains why sensible people reinforced the pattern. Teachers narrowed instruction toward exam-relevant coverage because deviation carried professional and social risk. Officials prioritised reporting and procedural compliance because these behaviours were monitored and carried lower personal risk. Families invested in private tutoring to manage uncertainty, especially where classroom learning did not reliably translate into predictable results.

An adaptive governance view explains why evidence did not trigger correction. Data travelled upward, but actionable feedback rarely returned to classrooms in time to matter. Reform

initiatives were often added as new activities rather than used to reshape the feedback relationships stabilising low learning.

The result was a stable pattern: expanding access alongside weak learning. No single actor caused this outcome. It emerged from the interaction between structure, incentive-shaped behaviour, and limited capacity for system-level learning and correction. This mirrors global experience in many systems where schooling expanded faster than learning (World Bank, 2018).

B3. The feedback architecture in four layers

The remainder of this appendix sets out the feedback architecture as four nested layers. These layers connect lived learning experience to deeper system dynamics and clarify where leverage for change lies. The layers are mutually reinforcing. They should not be read as a hierarchy of importance, but as a map of where behaviour is produced and stabilised.

Layer 1 explains the learning dynamics that determine whether learning accumulates or collapses in everyday experience. Layer 2 explains the domains that produce and constrain those dynamics. Layer 3 sets out the feedback loops that stabilise behaviour within and across domains, using Table B-1 as the organising map. Layer 4 identifies leverage points where structural shifts can change which loops dominate.

B4. Layer 1: Learning dynamics that determine whether learning accumulates

Chapter 3 identifies five learning dynamics that recur as decisive in Bangladesh’s system diagnosis, and Chapter 4 makes them concrete through lived experience: readiness, motivation, feedback, trust, and alignment. In this appendix they serve a specific purpose. They are the “surface conditions” that the deeper loops are producing.

These dynamics are not programmes or policies. They are conditions. When they are present, learning becomes possible and cumulative. When they are weak, learning fragments regardless of effort.

Readiness refers to whether learners can participate meaningfully in instruction from the first day they arrive. It includes early childhood development, health and nutrition, home language familiarity, emotional security, and basic exposure to print and talk. Readiness is not a one- time threshold. It is a continuing condition that can improve or deteriorate with attendance, classroom experience, and home stress. Weak readiness makes instruction feel like noise, which quickly weakens motivation and attendance.

Motivation refers to whether effort feels worthwhile. Motivation is shaped by early success, peer belonging, perceived fairness, and whether learning appears to lead somewhere. When motivation weakens, learners do not simply “try less”. They ration effort, disengage, and shift toward whatever activity feels safest for progression. In high-stakes settings, this often means a narrow focus on exam-relevant tasks and coaching, even when those tasks do not build durable competence.

Feedback refers to whether learners and teachers can adjust in time. Feedback must be frequent enough to be actionable, clear enough to interpret, and safe enough to respond to. When feedback is delayed, ambiguous, or punitive, it does not guide improvement. It trains

avoidance. Teachers teach to what is tested. Learners guess what matters. Families hedge through tutoring.

Trust refers to whether actors feel safe to act on learning evidence. Teachers must trust that slowing down for mastery will not be punished through supervision or exam results. Families must trust that assessment signals are credible and that classroom learning can carry their child forward. Officials must trust that reporting problems will not carry disproportionate risk. In low-trust environments, people protect themselves through compliance and private solutions.

Alignment refers to whether the system’s signals reinforce one another. Curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, supervision, and pathways must point in the same direction. When signals conflict, effort moves to the safest substitute. If curriculum says “competency” but exams reward memorisation, the exam signal wins. If policy says “foundations” but time is consumed by coverage pressure, foundations lose.

Layer 1 matters because it clarifies what “improvement” looks like in lived terms. System

change is not a collection of initiatives. It is a sustained shift in these five conditions.

B5. Layer 2: System domains that produce and constrain learning dynamics

The five learning dynamics do not arise in isolation. They are produced and constrained by five interacting domains. These domains are analytical rather than hierarchical. They help organise complexity without implying that any single institution controls outcomes.

B5.1 Learning and classroom dynamics

This domain covers what happens inside classrooms and schools: teacher motivation, instructional practice, classroom routines, time on task, peer dynamics, and professional culture. It is the site where learning is either built or lost day by day. Importantly, this domain is highly sensitive to signals from outside the classroom. In Bangladesh, classroom behaviour is strongly shaped by the examination and accountability environment. That is why classroom- focused reforms can appear sound but fail to spread.

In Table B-1, the key reinforcing loops in this domain include teacher motivation (R1, R14), curriculum–pedagogy–assessment coherence (R2), time on task and learner mastery (R15, R14b), peer belonging (R16), and teacher network learning (R11). The dominant balancing pressure is high-stakes examination pressure (B1). The central issue is dominance. When B1 dominates, it suppresses or redirects the reinforcing loops that would otherwise build mastery.

B5.2 Access, equity, and human capital

This domain covers the conditions that shape who can access learning, under what constraints, and with what level of readiness. It includes poverty, health and nutrition, gender norms, geography, household stress, home language, and early childhood experience. These factors shape readiness and attendance long before classroom instruction can compensate. This is why “equal provision” can still produce unequal learning.

In Table B-1, the compounding disadvantage loops are explicit: poverty–learning gaps (R5), health and nutrition shaping attendance and attention (R17), early childhood readiness (R18), language of instruction misalignment (B10), and the attendance–engagement cycle (R19).

These loops explain why gaps emerge early and widen over time, even when schools are present.

B5.3 Governance, data, and delivery systems

This domain covers how the system is managed at scale: authority, budgets, deployment, supervision, reporting, and accountability. It determines what behaviours are rewarded and what risks are punished. It also determines whether the system can learn from its own experience. This is where many reforms fail, not because they are technically wrong, but because they collide with compliance incentives and risk aversion.

In Table B-1, the paired loops (R4/B2 and R7/B6) are central. When policy, budget, and accountability align, implementation strengthens and improvement can become reinforcing (R4). When misalignment and delays dominate, behaviour shifts toward compliance and process (B2). The same is true for data. Timely, trusted data can support adaptation (R7). Delayed or reporting-focused data strengthens inertia (B6). Bureaucratic risk aversion (B3), transparency and trust erosion (B7), and patronage and political capture (B8) are not side issues in this architecture. They are stabilisers that shape what is safe to do.

B5.4 Markets, assessment, and technology

This domain covers examinations, private tutoring, digital tools, and external benchmarking signals. These are not external to the system. They are part of its behavioural logic. Market responses often reflect rational household strategies under uncertainty. Technology can strengthen learning only when it supports classroom practice and feedback. Otherwise it becomes another layer of unequal access and implementation noise.

In Table B-1, coaching industry expansion (R3) is a predictable response to high-stakes exams (B1). Digital adoption (R10) can become reinforcing when it supports pedagogy and feedback, but the digital divide (B11) can amplify inequity when access and teacher support are uneven. Benchmarking attention (R13/B9) often spikes and fades unless it is connected to domestic feedback loops and institutional follow-through.

B5.5 Labour markets and pathways

This domain covers the relationship between schooling, skills, employment, migration, and mobility. It shapes whether learning appears meaningful beyond exams. When the labour market rewards certificates more than competence, families and learners rationally prioritise progression signals over mastery. When technical and vocational pathways deliver visible returns, legitimacy and demand can become self-reinforcing.

In Table B-1, credentialism (R21) captures the skill–signal tension. Pathway legitimacy (R22) captures how visible labour market success can strengthen demand and employer engagement. The long-cycle development loop (R12) links skills to productivity and fiscal space, but it only becomes politically salient when nearer-term loops align.

Layer 2 matters because it prevents a common error: treating learning dynamics as classroom problems only. The dynamics are produced across domains and constrained by cross-domain signals.

B6. Layer 3: Feedback loops that stabilise system behaviour

Layer 3 is the core technical layer of this appendix. It explains why the system returns to familiar outcomes even after reform efforts. Table B-1 is not an appendix to the analysis. It is the map of the analysis. The narrative below reads the table as an interacting system, showing how loop dominance produces stable outcomes.

Table B1: Loop/Feedback Mapping of Bangladesh Education System

Domain	Definition / System Focus	Included Loops (summary)	Loop Definition
A. Learning and Classroom	Micro-level teaching– learning processes that shape what happens inside classrooms — teacher behaviour, student engagement, and pedagogical alignment.	R1 Teacher Motivation (Extrinsic–Status)	Higher pay and professional respect raise morale and teaching quality, reinforcing public trust and advocacy for education.
		R14 Teacher Motivation (Intrinsic– Purpose/Autonomy)	Teachers who experience purpose and autonomy innovate more and sustain engagement over time.
		R2 Curriculum–Pedagogy–Assessment Coherence	When curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment are aligned, teachers teach what matters and feedback drives improvement.
		R15 Classroom Time-on-Task	More engaged classroom time strengthens fluency and confidence, reducing off-task behaviour.
		R14b Learner Motivation and Mastery	Early success and enjoyment build confidence, sustaining literacy and numeracy progress.
		R16 Peer Learning and Belonging	Positive peer interactions encourage participation, collaboration, and belonging.
		B1 High-Stakes Exam Pressure	Excessive exam pressure fosters rote learning and anxiety, crowding out creativity.
		R11 Teacher Network Learning (PLC or Lesson Study)	Professional learning communities share good practice and normalise reflection.
B. Access, Equity, and Human Capital	Socioeconomic, gender, and spatial factors determining who can learn and under what conditions — including health, nutrition, and family context.	R5 Poverty–Learning Gap	Poverty limits readiness and achievement, perpetuating intergenerational disadvantage.
		B5 Gender Norms and Maternal Literacy	Gendered expectations and low maternal literacy reduce home learning support.
		R6 Urban–Rural Quality Divergence	Urban areas attract better teachers and resources, widening rural quality gaps.
		R17 Health–Nutrition–Attendance	Good health and nutrition improve attendance, focus, and learning outcomes.
		R18 Early Childhood (ECCE) Readiness	Quality early-childhood education builds readiness and long-term momentum.
		B10 Language of Instruction Misalignment	When schooling begins in a non-home language, comprehension and confidence decline.
		R19 Attendance–Engagement Cycle	Regular attendance builds success and learner identity, reinforcing continued participation.
C. Governance, Data, and Delivery Systems	The organisational architecture and information flows that determine how effectively the system learns and adapts.	R4 / B2 Policy–Budget–Performance	Effective policy–budget alignment creates a reinforcing cycle of clarity, resources and performance. When alignment weakens or delays accumulate, the balancing loop becomes dominant and resources are absorbed by compliance rather than learning.
		R7 / B6 Data–Decision–Adaptation	Timely, trusted data forms a reinforcing loop that supports adaptation and problem solving. When data is delayed, fragmented or used mainly for reporting, the balancing loop becomes dominant and institutional inertia strengthens.
		B3 Bureaucratic Inertia or Risk Aversion	Fear of error discourages experimentation and slows reform.
		R9 Pilot–Learning–Scale	Evaluated pilots that inform policy enable adaptive scaling and sustained learning.
		B7 Corruption–Trust Erosion	Lack of transparency erodes efficiency and weakens accountability.
		B8 Political Capture or Patronage	Patronage distorts staffing and resource allocation, reducing effectiveness.
		R8 Public Trust–Political Will	Visible reform success builds citizen trust and political momentum for change.

		R20 Headteacher Leadership Climate	Supportive school leaders create positive cultures and stronger teacher performance.
D. Market, Assessment and Technology	External mechanisms — exams, private tutoring, and technology — that shape incentives and learning experiences.	R3 Coaching Industry Expansion	Exam pressure fuels private coaching demand, diverting energy from classroom teaching.
		R13 / B9 Global Benchmark Attention	International rankings attract reform focus but fade without institutional follow-through.
		R10 Digital Adoption and Use	Access to digital tools enhances engagement and innovation.
		B11 Digital Divide Amplifier	Unequal digital access widens learning gaps and directs investment toward advantaged schools.
E. Labour Market and Pathways	Post-school transitions linking education to employability, productivity, and the legitimacy of different pathways.	R12 Demography–Skills–Productivity	A skilled workforce drives growth, enabling further investment in education.
		R21 Signalling vs Skills (Credentialism)	Overreliance on certificates over competence weakens motivation for genuine learning.
		R22 TVET or Pathway Legitimacy	Successful technical graduates elevate the status of vocational tracks, reinforcing demand and employer engagement.

Note: Reading the Map

Reinforcing loops (R) generate momentum — they are the virtuous cycles that accelerate improvement once set in motion.

Balancing loops (B) stabilise the system — sometimes useful, but when too rigid, they can block innovation.

A simple way to interpret Table B1 is to ask two questions.

First, which loops generate learning momentum when conditions allow. Second, which loops stabilise the system around low learning by rewarding safer substitutes such as memorisation, compliance, and private tutoring.

B6.1 The core stabiliser: high-stakes examination pressure (B1) and its downstream effects

Table B1 identifies B1 as a central balancing loop. It stabilises classroom behaviour around memorisation and narrow exam preparation. This loop is powerful because it is reinforced by rational responses elsewhere in the system.

When B1 dominates, it does not merely change teaching style. It changes what is considered safe professional practice. Teachers focus on coverage and predictability. Learners focus on tasks that are rewarded. Families invest in tutoring to reduce risk. These responses then reshape the system’s centre of gravity away from classroom learning and toward private solutions.

This is where Table B1 shows an important cross-domain link. B1 in the classroom domain interacts directly with R3 in the market domain. Exam pressure fuels coaching demand. Coaching demand normalises exam-centred learning. That normalisation increases pressure on teachers and learners to keep pace. The system stabilises around a high-cost equilibrium where households carry more of the burden and classroom learning becomes less trusted.

This interaction helps explain why pedagogical reforms can appear well-designed but fade. If B1 remains dominant, the system reabsorbs new pedagogy into old incentive structures.

B6.2 Why coherence is a leverage channel: R2 as the loop that makes other loops usable

R2 in Table B1 is not a generic “nice to have”. It is a coherence channel that determines whether feedback can be interpreted and acted on. When curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment point in the same direction, teachers can make sensible trade-offs, feedback becomes meaningful, and learner effort has a clearer pathway to success.

When R2 is weak, teachers face contradictory signals. Policy says one thing. Exams reward another. Supervision monitors a third. Under behavioural realism, teachers respond by following the safest signal, which is typically the exam. This is one mechanism through which B1 neutralises reform intent.

This matters because R2 is the bridge between Layer 1 and Layer 3. Alignment, one of the five learning dynamics, is not achieved by messaging. It is achieved when R2 is strengthened and B1 is moderated so that signals stop fighting.

B6.3 Teacher motivation and professional culture: R1, R14, and why they do not self- activate

Table B1 distinguishes two routes into teacher motivation: extrinsic status and recognition (R1) and intrinsic purpose and autonomy (R14). Both can strengthen instructional quality and persistence. However, in environments dominated by examination pressure and compliance

monitoring, intrinsic motivation is difficult to sustain. Autonomy becomes risky. Innovation can be punished. Teachers rationally narrow practice.

That is why professional learning networks (R11) matter. They provide a social infrastructure for improvement that reduces individual risk. They also create a local feedback loop where practice can evolve through peer observation and shared routines, even when system-wide feedback remains weak.

This is also where governance loops interact with classroom loops. If bureaucratic risk aversion (B3) is strong and supervision focuses on compliance, teachers experience reform as surveillance rather than professional growth. In that configuration, R14 weakens and R11 struggles to spread beyond pockets of practice.

B6.4 Early advantage and compounding gaps: R18, R17, B10, and R19

Table B1 makes explicit that readiness is produced through interacting loops in the access and human capital domain. Early childhood experience (R18) and health and nutrition (R17) strengthen attention, stamina, and attendance. Language of instruction misalignment (B10) can stabilise low comprehension from the beginning. Attendance–engagement (R19) then becomes a compounding loop. When learners experience success, attendance reinforces learning identity. When learners experience confusion and repeated failure, absence becomes rational and disengagement becomes self-reinforcing.

This explains why later interventions often arrive too late. Without readiness, motivation collapses. Without motivation, feedback is not acted on. A system can therefore “provide schooling” while still failing to produce learning, because the early loops that generate learning traction never became dominant.

B6.5 Governance and data: the paired loops that determine whether the system can learn (R4/B2 and R7/B6)

Table B1 includes two paired loop structures that are central to adaptive governance.

R4/B2 describes the policy–budget–performance channel. When priorities, budgets, and accountability are aligned, implementation strengthens and performance can become reinforcing (R4). When alignment weakens or delays accumulate, a balancing loop dominates (B2) where behaviour shifts toward compliance, reporting, and process absorption.

R7/B6 describes the data–decision–adaptation channel. When data is timely, trusted, and used locally, it supports problem solving and adaptation (R7). When data is delayed, fragmented, or used mainly for upward reporting, inertia strengthens (B6). Information accumulates without consequence.

These paired loops explain a common Bangladesh reality: the system can “know” learning is weak without being able to correct it. Evidence exists, but the feedback return path is broken. Schools do not receive actionable diagnosis. Officials do not receive safe signals that encourage experimentation. Instead, the system defends itself through process.

This is why Layer 3 has to be central. Weak learning persists not only because of classroom issues, but because governance and data loops prevent correction.

B6.6 Trust erosion and control escalation: B7 and its interaction with B3 and B2

Table B-1 includes corruption–trust erosion (B7) and political capture or patronage (B8). These are often treated as political context, but in a feedback architecture they behave as stabilisers. When trust is low, systems typically respond by increasing control, supervision, and compliance routines. That strengthens B2 and B3. Those loops then reduce experimentation and honest reporting, which further reduces trust. The system becomes trapped in a low- learning, high-control equilibrium.

This is also why reforms that add monitoring without strengthening credibility can backfire. They increase fear and box-ticking, not learning.

B7. Layer 4: Leverage points and why sequencing matters

Layer 4 translates the feedback architecture into practical leverage points. Leverage points are places where a small structural shift changes which loops dominate, altering system behaviour without requiring constant enforcement (Meadows, 2008). In Bangladesh, the most effective leverage points tend to sit at the level of information flow, signal credibility, risk distribution, and trust.

The point is not to propose a reform menu here. The point is to clarify why certain kinds of moves create lasting change, while others are absorbed.

B7.1 Information flows that return to the point of action

The system already generates information. The problem is return. When feedback reaches classrooms and local offices in time to guide action, loops like R7 can become dominant. When feedback remains upward and delayed, B6 dominates and the system “knows” without adjusting.

A practical leverage move is therefore not more data, but different data flow: shorter cycle, more local, more interpretable, and connected to routines that allow action without blame. This directly strengthens the conditions for feedback and trust in Layer 1.

B7.2 Credibility of signals, especially assessment and pathways

Signal credibility is the structural precondition for reducing risk management behaviour. If assessment signals reward memorisation, B1 dominates regardless of curriculum intent. If certificates matter more than competence, R21 dominates regardless of pedagogy. Credibility reform changes the reward landscape that actors respond to.

This is also why moderation of exam pressure is not a soft issue. It is a loop dominance issue. If B1 remains dominant, R2, R11, and learner mastery loops cannot spread.

B7.3 Risk distribution and the safety of professional judgement

In compliance-heavy environments, B3 dominates because the personal cost of deviation is high. A leverage point is therefore the distribution of risk: making it safer for teachers and officials to surface problems, slow down, and adjust. This is not achieved through exhortation.

It is achieved through predictable protection, credible consequences, and routines that treat diagnosis as normal rather than as failure.

This leverage point is where behavioural realism meets adaptive governance. If acting on learning evidence is safer than avoiding it, behaviour shifts.

B7.4 Trust as a system condition, not a slogan

Trust is produced by repeated follow-through. Families trust when classroom learning and assessment signals align. Teachers trust when professional judgement is supported rather than punished. Officials trust when honest reporting does not create disproportionate political or bureaucratic risk.

In the architecture, trust is not an aspiration. It is the condition that determines whether the system can learn. When trust is weak, control escalates, B2 and B3 strengthen, and learning loops weaken.

B7.5 Why sequencing matters in this architecture

Sequencing is not about preference. It is about loop interactions.

If stakes rise before credibility improves, defensive behaviour increases and B1 and B3 strengthen.

If autonomy rises before coherence improves, confusion increases and R2 weakens. If data rises without safe routines, reporting expands and B6 strengthens. If pilots expand without absorption, R9 becomes noise rather than learning.

This is why early reform phases must concentrate on changing feedback returns, credibility, and routine coherence, not on adding initiatives. Once balancing loops that stabilise low learning weaken, reinforcing loops that support readiness, motivation, feedback, trust, and alignment can become dominant.

B8. Conclusion: what this architecture clarifies

This appendix has argued that weak learning persists not because effort is absent, but because the system is structured in ways that stabilise low-learning outcomes. Table B-1 makes that structure visible. It shows that the system contains both learning-strengthening loops and learning-limiting loops, and that outcomes depend on which loops dominate under current conditions.

The core stabilisers are clear in the table. Examination pressure (B1), compliance-oriented governance and risk aversion (B2, B3), and weak feedback return from data to practice (B6) together create an environment where rational actors protect themselves through coverage, reporting, and private solutions. In that environment, reinforcing loops that could build mastery and professional culture (R2, R11, R14b, R15) activate only locally or temporarily.

The practical implication is equally clear. Sustainable improvement requires shifting loop dominance by strengthening information returns, credibility of signals, safe problem-solving routines, and trust. These are not the most visible reform sites, but they are the most

consequential. They determine whether the system can learn from its own experience and whether improvements can spread rather than remain isolated.

Chapter 3 uses this architecture to diagnose why the system returns to familiar outcomes. Chapter 4 shows how these dynamics are experienced by learners, teachers, and families. The chapters that follow use the same architecture to justify sequencing, because some stabilising loops must weaken before learning-strengthening loops can take hold.

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