Education Policy Overhaul Inadequate in Deliberation, Fleeting in Effect

Mar 7 , 2026.

Berhanu Nega, a university professor-cum-opposition leader, is attempting one of the most sweeping overhauls the education sector has seen in decades. University financing, teacher training, curriculum revisions and the regulatory squeeze on international schools are all being folded into a reform drive meant to reshape the system.

It is an ambitious undertaking. It is also increasingly one that looks rushed, fragmented and at risk of confusing regulatory activism with meaningful change.

Over the years, the country had grown familiar with waves of reform. New policies arrive with urgency, often wrapped in the language of transformation and national renewal. What has been less common is sustained public debate over whether these reforms are internally coherent, practically sequenced or institutionally deliverable. The country has become adept at producing policy. It has been far less successful at anchoring it. Too often, a policy’s lifespan is tied to the tenure of the official who introduced it, leaving schools, universities and families to adjust repeatedly to shifting rules from above.

When Berhanu’s reform package was introduced, it was presented as a broad attempt to deliver systemic and holistic change. That promise is already showing signs of strain. What is unfolding appears less like a coherent policy architecture than a succession of disconnected measures, each carrying major consequences of its own, but without the reassurance of a stable strategic framework. The result is mounting anxiety, especially among parents and private school operators now being asked to make abrupt adjustments with little certainty about where the reforms ultimately lead.

The most immediate controversy lies in the Ministry’s directive on international schools. To retain their “international” status, these schools are now required to ensure that one-third of their student body is composed of foreign nationals. Those who fail risk losing the designation and being compelled to switch to what officials insist is a national curriculum that meets global standards. The Ministry’s officials argue that the local curriculum is not materially different to what many of these schools already teach.

Yet the official reassurance has been met with suspicion rather than trust. The backlash has exposed a deeper and more uncomfortable reality. A large number of parents who enrolled their children in international schools did so precisely because they lacked confidence in the domestic system. That is not a problem that can be regulated away. It is a crisis of credibility.

The compliance burden imposed on schools is also glaringly unrealistic. A one-year grace period may appear reasonable on paper, but the recruitment of international students is not a variable that school administrators can engineer at will. It depends on expatriate mobility, demand from families of foreign nationalities, diplomatic and business presence, and the country’s broader appeal to international families. These are structural conditions, not enrolment targets to be met through administrative enthusiasm.

The penalties for noncompliance are severe. Schools stand to lose their brand identity, face forced curricular changes and absorb reputational damage that may prove difficult to reverse. Students, meanwhile, will bear the heaviest and most immediate burden. If schools fail to meet the quota, children may be forced to transfer elsewhere. But elsewhere may not exist at the scale policymakers appear to assume. Most international schools do not have the capacity to absorb a sudden redistribution of displaced students.

The likely result would be academic disruption, social dislocation and needless instability for families who had no role in designing the policy now upending their children’s schooling.

The directive imposed on international schools also does not stand alone. It follows another wave of intervention in the international school segment last year, when schools were pressed to expand scholarship provision for high-achieving, low-income students. The latter was framed as a reformist corrective, even though many of the institutions affected had already adopted such practices on their own.

But the pattern should be telling. Schools are being treated not as partners in raising standards, but as administrative targets for extraction, discipline and conformity.

That is where a larger concern begins to form. The current reform drive may be speaking the language of quality, but it risks being interpreted as driven as much by fiscal motives as by educational ones. When reform begins to look like a hunt for tax revenue, compliance fees and regulatory leverage, public trust erodes. In education, trust is not a secondary matter. It is the foundation on which reform either stands or collapses.

The same tension is visible in higher education. Proposals for students to transition into teaching roles toward the end of their university studies have been floated as a response to teacher shortages and financial pressures in the public system. The rationale is understandable. Local schools do face staffing shortages, and universities are under strain. But burdening students and institutions with structural responsibilities they are not equipped to shoulder is no substitute for solving the underlying problem. It may temporarily reduce fiscal pressure, but it does not amount to reform in any serious sense. It is a workaround masquerading as a strategy.

Nor can curriculum changes be treated in isolation from the examination and admissions systems that have long structured academic progression. Altering curricular content inevitably affects how students are assessed, grades are interpreted, and university entry is determined. Students caught in the middle of such transitions do not experience reform as an abstract policy achievement. They experience it as uncertainty, confusion and risk. Adjustment is natural in any education system, while systemic whiplash is not.

None of this is to deny the legitimacy of the Ministry’s stated policy objectives. Standardisation, better oversight, improved teacher supply and tighter quality control are all valid public concerns. No education system can function well without a serious regulatory approach. But seriousness is not the same as haste. Reform without sequencing, transition mechanisms, institutional readiness and broad public deliberation can end up defeating itself. A compressed compliance window for structural transformation is not evidence of resolve. It is often evidence of insufficient policy design.

The harder truth is that the most urgent weaknesses in education lie elsewhere and are much less glamorous than directives issued from ministerial offices up at Arat Kilo. Teacher pay remains persistently inadequate. School infrastructure in many areas remains poor or makeshift. Temporary learning shelters continue to serve as substitutes for proper classrooms. Budgetary commitments, though growing in nominal terms, tell a story of declining priority when measured against the full size of the federal budget and the economy.

Education spending reached 200.4 billion Br in 2024/25, an 11pc nominal increase from the prior year. Yet the sector’s share of the federal budget slipped to 22pc, down 1.3 percentage points, while spending as a share of GDP fell to 2.3pc, 1.4 percentage points lower than in 2022/23 and roughly half the level recorded in 2012. Those figures reveal a sector under strain, not one being strengthened at its foundations.

The present moment calls for caution. Reform that concentrates on regulating private operators, redrawing classifications and tightening fiscal claims while leaving core quality deficits unresolved risks missing the point of education altogether. Education is not a revenue line. It is not a tax base waiting to be formalised. It is a public good, a nation-building enterprise and one of the few long-horizon investments a country makes in itself.

If policymakers are serious about reform, they need to detach it from a narrow fiscal lens and return it to its proper purpose. The overriding question should not be how much revenue can be mobilised or how quickly schools can be brought into compliance. It should be whether students are learning better, teachers are supported more effectively, institutions are becoming more credible, and families are gaining reason to trust the system again.

PUBLISHED ON Mar 07,2026 [ VOL 26 , NO 1349]