The NERDC Curriculum by the Numbers: What 28 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 data. Twenty-eight subject files covering every level from Basic Education through Senior Secondary. The Scale of the Curriculum The Nigerian curriculum covers 28 distinct subjects across three education levels. Basic Education covers the widest breadth. 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 and by year within each level. Multiply that across all subjects and you get thousands of distinct topic-to-learning-objective mappings. What a Topic Actually Contains A single topic in the NERDC curriculum includes topic title and scope, learning objectives (specific, measurable statements), content notes, suggested activities, assessment criteria, and reference materials. 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 is preparing a lesson, they need to reference all of these elements. 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. What Curriva Does Differently Curriva helps educators see curriculum content in context, including the learning expectations and connections that matter when planning instruction. When a teacher selects a topic, the system surfaces the learning objectives, assessment formats, and connections to future learning. This is not AI generating content from nothing. It is a system that understands the structure of what should be taught.