The nation is eagerly awaiting an exciting, people-friendly budget 2026-2027 from the new government that reflects most of their desires. It is expected that the new government’s budget 2026-2027 will be placed based on the lessons learned from the previous government’s budgets.
Education Budget as a share of the Total Budget and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) expenditure on education as a percentage has not shown a positive trend over the previous fiscal years. The expenditure on education as a share of GDP has been less than 2 per cent between FY2016 and FY2026.
The revised budget for the education sector as a share of GDP decreased substantially, from 1.9 per cent in FY2020 to 1.52 per cent in the FY2025 budget. This indicates that the government consistently lags in meeting its target of spending at least 6 per cent of GDP on education, as prescribed by UNESCO.
Against this backdrop of the education budget 2026-2027, the declaration to increase it to 5 per cent of GDP sounds like a revolutionary step. Necessarily, questions arise whether we can do it, keeping millions of children untreated who are suffering from measles, keeping non-government teachers in the same status they have been for long and facing frequent and unexpected natural calamities?
It is promising that the present government considers education the best investment for the nation and is committed to building a quality, life-oriented, and inclusive education system.
A big question, peeps: how can quality, life-oriented education be ensured? Whenever the question of quality education comes up, we focus on two most popular areas—one is teacher training, and the other is curriculum change. Both are very gigantic tasks, entailing a huge amount of money, but the results are very poor.
Each budget has three objectives: the source of funding, sound planning for its use, and bringing comfort to people’s lives. Considering these areas, what might be the first criterion for addressing the burning issues in education? The teachers engaged in teaching to ensure quality education stand at the lowest category among the South Asian nations- a recent study has unveiled it.
It is an obvious fact and a grave concern for us. So, first of all, a level test must be conducted for all the teachers to categorise them. The contents of a level test can roughly be categorised into subject knowledge, pedagogy, general knowledge, and innovative ideas.
Based on their category, different remedial measures are needed. Suppose one category of teachers can be given time to develop their situation, and another group can be provided with exclusive training. The same type of training without assessing the teachers’ real situation is just a waste of time and money.
Then, the graduation-level examination at NU must be leakproof and very standardised, as we get most of our teachers from this university. Usually, graduates from public and renowned private universities do not enter teaching.
NU provides a large number of teachers at the primary, secondary, and higher secondary levels. The quality of these graduates has been questionable for a long time, and it must be standardised so that our future generation has a minimum level of teaching, which is now a very poor show. These are the basic steps the government should take to bring quality teaching.
The government must have a robust budget 2026-2027 to conduct a ‘level test‘ to categorise teachers, and they must be motivated first; otherwise, most of them will not show interest. We cannot afford to change our curriculum again and again.
Who will implement the curriculum? Do we have that level of teachers? Do we know what percentage of teachers are really delivering effectively in the classroom? We do not have any such statistics. So, it must be done first. We cannot afford to employ a large number of quality teachers at once, and it is not possible either.
Then come teachers’ encouragement and incentives. We must nationally decide whether our primary, secondary, and higher secondary education, which means fundamental education, will be run by the state, by the community, or entirely in the private sector. One part of our fundamental education is primary education, which is run by the state, but secondary and higher secondary education face serious state neglect.
These two levels are quite discriminating. The current MPO practice is a temporary system that cannot provide a tangible solution to this problem. When primary teachers are government, secondary and higher secondary are non-government, they definitely feel neglected and demotivated. This major issue must be addressed, and a significant budget must be allocated to it.
Even if the government cannot afford to nationalise these two levels of teachers, this must be explained, and teachers’ salaries and other due benefits must be very regular and reasonable compared to those of other professions, through devising an alternative way.
We need not think of establishing more and more public universities that require huge amounts of money, which is quite unreasonable given that our basic education is on shaky ground. How can we think of establishing only higher educational institutions? We already have quite a few universities where efforts must be made to ensure quality. We need to rein in spending on higher education while maintaining basic levels.
Another big issue has been creating confusion, causing problems, and resulting in monetary loss. Educational institutions do not exist uniformly across our population, and the importance of place and location is significant. This applies from primary to higher education institutions.
They are so unreasonably scattered that a government primary school has only three students, whereas another school has more than three thousand students, and the same holds for the secondary and higher secondary levels as well.
This situation causes two harms: first, a significant loss of national resources, and second, it seriously undermines the quality of education, as the usual teaching and learning environment does not occur in these institutions. So, the government must have a ‘sound mapping’ plan for distributing and resetting educational institutions based on population density and the importance of places, such as urban areas and the remotest parts of the country.
The government must have a significant budget 2026-2027 for mapping educational institutions. These are the problems prioritised in education now. Curriculum, unplanned teacher training, and multimedia classrooms are not the major or fundamental issues in Bangladesh’s education at this moment.
Ineffective teaching and learning go on due to some known facts, such as unreasonable teacher-student ratio, students’ absenteeism, less reasonable assessment system, students’ passing in the examination on mercy, political cheap popularity and local political people’s influence on institutional heads are some other big issues of education that must be taken into serious consideration and addressing these areas also needs money.
Without looking into these matters, merely thinking about curriculum change will yield no tangible results. Money should be allocated in the budget 2026-2027 to address these issues if we really want to improve our beloved country’s education system.
About the Author
Masum Billah works as a President of the English Teachers' Association of Bangladesh (ETAB), Dhaka, Bangladesh. He previously worked as an Education Specialist at BRAC, an international NGO in Bangladesh.