Beyond enrolment: Bangladesh needs curriculum adaptation for inclusive education

A nine-year-old boy from Tarash upazila in Sirajganj started school at five. For him, it was a place of joy — children his own age, time outside the home, teachers who seemed glad to see him. But at the end of his first year in pre-primary, a difficult reality surfaced. He has an intellectual disability that affects how he learns, remembers and concentrates. 

Although he had spent a full year in school, his exam papers were filled with doodles rather than answers. Since the school did not hold him back, he was promoted to Class 1. The question this raises is one that Bangladesh's inclusive education agenda can no longer avoid: is school enrolment enough?

According to the Annual Primary School Statistics 2024, roughly more than one lakh children with disabilities were enrolled across pre-primary and primary (grades 1–5) schools nationwide — down from 125,000 in 2021. 

School gates have opened for all children, but the curriculum remains largely closed to many of them. While the data alone cannot tell us whether families are withdrawing children from a system that cannot adapt to their needs, this is precisely the question policymakers must ask. 

Bangladesh has made important legal and policy commitments to this end. Article 17 of the Constitution, the Primary Education (Compulsory) Act 1990, the National Education Policy 2010, and the Rights and Protection of Persons with Disabilities Act 2013 have together shifted the conversation from charity to rights, establishing that children with disabilities should not be excluded from education simply because they learn, communicate, or move differently. 

But these frameworks measure success at the school gate. The boy from Tarash crossed that gate and remained outside of education.

Too often, inclusion is understood as enrolment, attendance, ramps, stipends, or assistive devices. These are all necessary. But physical presence in a classroom does not automatically produce learning. A child with a disability may sit through every lesson and still be excluded if the textbook, task, pace, and assessment remain designed for only one kind of learner.

Curriculum adaptation addresses precisely this gap. It means changing how a lesson is taught, how a child is expected to respond, how much time they are given, and how their progress is assessed. 

For a child with an intellectual disability, such as the boy from Tarash, this might mean breaking a task into smaller steps, using visual or concrete materials alongside oral instruction, allowing more time, or accepting a drawing or a gesture where a written answer would otherwise be required. The goal is not to simplify what is being learned or lower the quality of education, but to make the path to learning accessible.

This is where Bangladesh needs to move from policy promise to classroom practice. Under recent Special Education Needs and Disability (SEND) initiatives, training in inclusive pedagogy has reached over 98,000 teachers — a meaningful achievement. 

But broad pedagogical training cannot replace structured curriculum adaptation tools at the subject level. Many primary teachers manage large classes with limited time and minimal support. It is unfair to expect a teacher to intuitively know how to adapt tomorrow's Bangla, English, or mathematics lesson for a child with intellectual disability without specific guidance. Goodwill matters; it cannot replace a practical system.

The SEND Framework under the Directorate of Primary Education already advocates Universal Design for Learning (UDL) — the principle of designing lessons from the outset so children can engage through different modes: seeing, hearing, touching, doing, or through assistive support. 

For this to move from framework to classroom, the National Curriculum and Textbook Board (NCTB) and the Directorate of Primary Education must work together to translate these principles into subject-specific tools, adapted materials, and flexible assessment guidelines. This is not a distant aspiration. 

Curriculum adaptation means changing how a lesson is taught, how a child is expected to respond, how much time they are given, and how their progress is assessed. The goal is not to simplify what is being learned or lower the quality of education, but to make the path to learning accessible.

Under the Fourth Primary Education Development Program and the QLEAP initiative, the NCTB is already revising the primary curriculum and developing new Supplementary Reading Materials slated for distribution in 2025-26. These ongoing reforms present a concrete window to embed UDL principles into new materials. 

At the same time, they are still being drafted, rather than retrofitting inclusion into a curriculum that has already been finalised. Curriculum adaptation must also be integrated into both pre-service and in-service teacher training so that it becomes a professional skill rather than an improvised act of kindness.

However, curriculum adaptation cannot rest solely on the shoulders of classroom teachers, and this is where Individualised Education Plans, or IEPs, become essential. Not as a bureaucratic add-on, but as a structural mechanism that distributes responsibility across a small team: the classroom teacher, the head teacher, parents or caregivers, and, where available, a resource teacher or special educator. 

An IEP records what a child can currently do, what support they need, and what learning goals are realistic. It ensures that the question of how to include a child is answered collectively and in advance, rather than left to one teacher to resolve alone in front of thirty children.

When teaching is adapted to a child's actual abilities, the outcomes speak for themselves. Mahmuda Protibandhi School in Kaliakoir, Gazipur, began in 2014 with only five students, after a mother named Shamsunnahar Kabir could not find a suitable school for her daughter with a disability. Registered under the Department of Social Services in 2022, it now serves 80 students. 20 of them have secured employment through skills developed at the school. Children often dismissed as unable to participate have demonstrated, with the right support, that they can.

The success of inclusive education should not be measured solely by the number of children with disabilities enrolled. It should be measured by whether they are participating, making progress, and feeling that the classroom belongs to them. 

Bangladesh has opened many school gates, and that is a genuine achievement. The next challenge is to open the curriculum. Inclusion cannot stop at attendance. For the boy from Tarash and for the roughly 102,000 children already in the system, education begins only when the lesson itself is sufficiently adapted to let them learn.