Punjab Approves New School Curriculum, Cuts Textbook Load by 25%

Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz Sharif approved a revised school curriculum for government schools on September 24, 2026, cutting textbook volume by 25 percent and adding QR-coded video lessons to the surviving material.

What the reform changes

The approval came during a special meeting on education reforms in Lahore, where officials reviewed revised curricula for English, Mathematics, Urdu, Social Studies and Early Childhood Education. The stated goal is to move away from rote memorisation toward material that emphasises understanding and learning outcomes — a criticism that has followed Punjab's textbooks for years. The revised books will carry QR codes students can scan to reach video lessons tied to the topic on the page in front of them, an attempt to extend the classroom into a phone screen without redesigning the whole system at once.

The rollout is staged rather than immediate: it starts with Early Childhood Education through Grade 5, with the new books scheduled for the academic session that begins in April 2027. Grades above that continue on the existing curriculum for now. The Punjab government has also directed officials to prepare a separate artificial-intelligence curriculum covering Grade 1 through Grade 12, though no timeline for that track was announced alongside the September 24 approval.

Why the textbook load became the target

Punjab's primary curriculum has drawn criticism for years for being too dense and too memorisation-heavy, a pattern that traces back to the province's 2021 rollout of the Single National Curriculum (SNC). That rollout was itself contested: the president of the All Pakistan Private Schools' Federation argued at the time that the SNC was implemented in haste, without recruiting enough new teachers or upgrading school infrastructure to match the new material. Researchers studying SNC implementation since then have documented recurring difficulty among teachers in interpreting the curriculum and preparing daily lessons around it — friction this reform is aimed at reducing by simply giving teachers and students less to get through, and a QR-linked video as a second way in when the text alone doesn't land.

The money problem underneath it

None of this addresses the more structural constraint on Punjab's — and Pakistan's — education system: financing. Pakistan spends roughly 2 percent of GDP on education, well short of the 4 percent benchmark commonly cited as necessary to meet the relevant Sustainable Development Goal targets. A lighter curriculum and a QR code do not by themselves fix teacher shortages or crumbling school infrastructure; they are a cheaper intervention than the harder, more expensive fixes those problems actually require. Whether Punjab pairs this rollout with the teacher training investment that past SNC criticism specifically flagged as missing will likely determine whether the reform improves outcomes or just repackages the same lessons into fewer pages.

Where this fits into Pakistan's wider education picture

The curriculum overhaul lands in a system already under strain at both ends: millions of children remain out of school nationally, a crisis we've covered in detail separately, while the students who do stay in the pipeline face bottlenecks further along, such as the medical college seat shortage exposed by this year's MDCAT results, which we've also reported on. A lighter, less memorisation-driven curriculum addresses one part of a much larger set of constraints on Pakistani education — and its real test will come in April 2027, when the first cohort of students actually opens the new books.

Build Better Pakistan's Education Desk covers curriculum policy, access to schooling and the institutions that shape learning outcomes across Pakistan.