People and places
Picture courtesy of John Rider, Teacher at NIS Nur-Sultan.
Changing the education system of a whole country Geoffrey Neuss reports on setting up a curriculum in Kazakhstan Kazakhstan became an independent country in 1991 following the dissolution of the USSR. By the beginning of the twenty first century it was clear that the Kazakh secondary education system based on the old Soviet model required radical change. Their Certificate of Secondary Education was not accepted as an entry qualification to any university outside of Kazakhstan, and students leaving secondary school were unable to demonstrate an ability to think critically. In 2010 the Kazakh Government planned to establish twenty new trilingual (Russian, Kazakh and English) secondary schools around the country to pilot a new public education system, These were to be known as the Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools (NIS). Winter
Summer |
| 2020
I was invited by the European Commission to travel to Astana (now Nur-Sultan) in 2010 to advise NIS on devising and setting up a new curriculum. My brief was to compare the Kazakh system with recognised international systems for science education and to make recommendations for changes. Before arriving in Nur-Sultan I asked to be sent the current syllabuses so that I could compare them with the A Level, Pre-U, IB Diploma, AP and European Baccalaureate syllabuses. The Kazakh syllabus was much more factually based than international syllabuses and included some material that would normally not be covered until university. However it lacked any real structure, with no clear aims or objectives. No distinction was made between the recall of
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