The NERDC Curriculum by the Numbers: What 30 Subject Files Tell Us

When we started building Curriva, the first thing we did was not write code. It was data extraction. We took the NERDC curriculum documents and broke them down into structured, machine-readable data. Thirty subject files covering every level from Basic Education through Senior Secondary.

Here is what the numbers look like.

The Scale of the Curriculum

The Nigerian curriculum covers 30 distinct subjects across three education levels. Basic Education (primary school) covers the widest breadth. Students encounter Mathematics, English, Basic Science and Technology, Social Studies, Cultural and Creative Arts, and Physical and Health Education, among others. By Junior Secondary, this narrows into more specialized tracks. Senior Secondary branches further into Science, Commercial, Arts, and Technical programs.

Each subject is divided by term (first, second, third) and by year within each level. For Mathematics alone, that means separate content specifications for JSS1 first term, JSS1 second term, JSS1 third term, JSS2 first term, and so on through SSS3. Multiply that across all subjects and you get a curriculum structure with thousands of distinct topic-to-learning-objective mappings.

What a Topic Actually Contains

A single topic in the NERDC curriculum is not just a heading. It includes:

1. Topic title and scope -- What the topic covers and how it relates to adjacent topics in the same term.
2. Learning objectives -- Specific, measurable statements of what students should be able to do after instruction. These are not vague aspirations. They are concrete skills: "Solve linear equations in one variable," "Identify the parts of a microscope," "Construct a frequency table from raw data."
3. Content notes -- Guidance for teachers on what to emphasize, common misconceptions, and how the topic connects to real-world applications.
4. Suggested activities -- Hands-on work, group projects, and practical exercises that reinforce the content.
5. Assessment criteria -- How student mastery should be evaluated, including the types of questions appropriate for the topic.
6. Reference materials -- Textbooks, online resources, and other materials aligned with the topic.

Most edtech tools treat curriculum as a list of headings. The reality is far more structured.

The Problem This Creates for Educators

When a teacher in Kano is preparing a lesson plan for JSS2 Mathematics, second term, on "Introduction to Algebraic Expressions," they need to reference all of these elements. They need to know which specific learning objectives apply. They need to see the prerequisite topics from JSS1. They need assessment questions that match the curriculum's expectations, not generic math problems.

In practice, most teachers do this by hand. They pull out the curriculum document, find the relevant section, and spend hours translating it into a lesson plan. Then they do it again for the next lesson. And the next.

This is where most edtech tools fail. They offer generic lesson plan templates that are not connected to the actual curriculum. A teacher using these tools still has to do the curriculum alignment work themselves. The tool saves them time on formatting but not on the substantive work of understanding what should be taught and how.

What Curriva Does Differently

Our curriculum database is not a list of topics. It is a structured graph. Each topic links to its learning objectives, its prerequisites, its related topics in other subjects, and its assessment criteria. When a teacher selects "Quadratic Equations" for JSS3 Mathematics, the system knows:

• Which specific learning objectives apply (there are six for this topic)
• Which prerequisite topics students should have mastered (linear equations, factorization, indices)
• Which assessment formats are appropriate (theory questions with worked examples, objective questions with specific distractor patterns)
• How this topic connects to SSS1 Mathematics (it is a foundation for the function concept)

This is what we call curriculum intelligence. It is not AI generating content from nothing. It is a system that understands the structure of what should be taught so that the content it produces is actually aligned with what the teacher needs.

The Data Behind Our Research

We are using this structured data as the foundation for our educator research. When we ask teachers about their resource creation workflows, we are not asking generic questions. We are asking about specific topics, specific learning objectives, specific assessment formats.

A teacher who tells us they spend three hours creating a scheme of work for JSS2 Basic Science is giving us information we can act on. We know exactly what topics are in that scheme, what the learning objectives are, and what the assessment criteria look like. We can design tools that address that specific workload.

This is why the data extraction matters. The NERDC curriculum is not just a reference document. It is the foundation of everything Curriva builds. And understanding its structure at this level of detail is what allows us to build tools that actually reduce educator workload instead of just adding another layer of abstraction.

Next Steps

If you are a Nigerian educator, you can explore how this curriculum data maps to your subject and level in the Curriva curriculum browser. If you want to help shape the tools we build based on this data, take our educator survey. For a deeper look at how we translated this data into an editor, read our widget architecture deep-dive.