New SHS curriculum in Ghana: what changed, plus every official syllabus PDF

If you are in SHS right now, or heading there soon, you have heard people talk about the “new curriculum”. Your teachers mention it. It comes up on the news. Somebody in your WhatsApp group has forwarded a PDF claiming to be the new syllabus. Some of what you hear is true, some is outdated, and a lot of it is just confusing.

This article clears it up. You will find out whether the new curriculum affects you and your exams, what actually changes in the classroom, and you can download the official syllabus for every subject directly from NaCCA, the government body that writes them. No third-party mirrors, no forwarded PDFs of unknown age.

First: does the new curriculum affect you?

Find yourself in this list before you read anything else.

• You are in JHS. Yes. Basic schools already teach the standards-based curriculum, and the BECE is set from it. When you enter SHS you will continue on the new system.
• You entered SHS 1 in the 2024/25 academic year or later. Yes. You are in the first group learning under the new SHS curriculum. The syllabuses linked below are yours.
• You are in SHS 2 or SHS 3 on the old system. No change for you. You finish your programme under the old curriculum and your WASSCE will be set from the old syllabus. Nobody moves you midway.
• You are a private or Nov/Dec candidate.No change either. WAEC prints “Old Curriculum” on the private-candidate timetable itself. If you are re-sitting, the syllabus you learned is still the syllabus you will be examined on. See the official Nov/Dec 2026 timetable for your dates.

What actually changes for you in class

Forget the policy language for a moment. Here is what the new curriculum means in practice, sitting at your desk:

• Your classwork counts.Under the old system, everything came down to the final exam. Under the new one, projects, group work and class exercises feed into your assessment through the school year. A bad term of “I will fix it during revision” costs you real marks now.
• Questions test whether you can use it, not just recall it.Expect fewer “define the following” questions and more problems where you apply what you learned to a situation. If your study habit is memorising notes the night before, this curriculum will punish that habit.
• There are subjects your seniors never had. Robotics. Aviation and Aerospace Engineering. Biomedical Science. Manufacturing Engineering. Spanish and Arabic as languages. If you are still in JHS, it is worth knowing these exist before you choose your SHS programme.
• ICT skills run through everything. Computing and ICT are no longer side subjects for one group of students. The curriculum expects every student to handle digital tools.

Why you should download your own syllabus

Most students never read the syllabus for their own subjects. That is a mistake, and it is an easy one to fix.

The syllabus is the agreement between you and the examiner. It lists everything you can be asked, term by term and year by year. When your teacher rushes a topic, the syllabus tells you what you missed. When you revise, it is your checklist: go topic by topic and be honest about which ones you can handle and which ones you are avoiding. When a friend claims “they removed that topic”, you check the document instead of arguing.

Each PDF below is the full official curriculum for that subject, published by NaCCA. Download the ones for your subjects and keep them on your phone. They cost nothing but data.

Download the official syllabus for every SHS subject

All of these live on NaCCA's secondary education curriculum page, which is the page to bookmark in case any document gets revised.

What this means for BECE and WASSCE

WAEC examines you on the curriculum you were taught. That is the rule that settles every rumour.

• The BECE already follows the new basic-school curriculum.
• Students who started SHS under the old system will write the old WASSCE, and the Nov/Dec series for private candidates stays on the old syllabus for now.
• The first WASSCE based on the new SHS curriculum arrives when the new-curriculum students reach their final year. If that is you, the syllabuses above are the most reliable picture of what your exam can contain, because WAEC sets papers from them.

One warning: do not study from old syllabus PDFs circulating in study groups if you are on the new curriculum, and do not study from the new ones if you are writing an old-curriculum paper. Matching the right document to your own exam is half the battle.

Syllabus in hand. What about textbooks?

The syllabus tells you what to learn. The learning materials are the official books that actually teach it, and NaCCA publishes those too, free to download. We put together a separate guide on where to find them: where to download the official learning materials.

Next reads

• Where to download the official learning materials for the new curriculum
• The official WASSCE Nov/Dec 2026 timetable
• BECE 2026 prep guide