Complete NERDC Scheme of Work for Nigerian Secondary Schools (JSS 1 – SS 3, 2026)

1. What NERDC actually is

The Nigerian Educational Research and Development Council, NERDC, is the federal agency that designs and revises school curricula for Nigeria. It sits under the Federal Ministry of Education and works with the West African Examinations Council (WAEC), the National Examinations Council (NECO), and the Joint Admissions and Matriculations Board (JAMB) so that what is taught in classrooms lines up with what is later examined.

NERDC does not run schools. It publishes the syllabus, the scheme of work derived from it, and the recommended evaluation methods. Implementation is delegated to state ministries of education and to individual school proprietors, which is why the same subject can look very different across a federal unity school, a Lagos public school, and a private mission school. They are all working from the same NERDC document but interpreting it differently.

2. What changed in the 2024/2025 SSEC revision

In late 2024 NERDC rolled out the most significant senior-secondary curriculum revision in over a decade, branded the Senior Secondary Education Curriculum (SSEC) review. Three things changed in a way schools should care about:

• Subject consolidation. Overlapping subjects were either merged or moved into a single track. Social Studies and Civic Education, for example, were collapsed into Citizenship and Heritage Studies at SS level. Computer Studies became Digital Technologies at both JSS and SS.
• Trade subjects became compulsory at JSS. Every JSS student must now pick one of six trades: Solar Photovoltaic Installation, Fashion Design, Livestock Farming, Beauty and Cosmetology, Computer Hardware & GSM Repairs, or Horticulture. The same six are offered at SS as electives.
• Behavioural objectives are now tied to ACTFL / Bloom verbs. Every topic must list what the learner will be able to describe, identify, calculate, demonstrate by the end of the lesson, not vague verbs like "know" or "understand". That is the single biggest change inspectors now check for during scheme review.

3. JSS vs SS structure (3 + 3)

Nigerian secondary education follows a 3 + 3 model. Junior Secondary School (JSS) spans JSS 1 to JSS 3 and ends with the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE). Senior Secondary School (SS) spans SS 1 to SS 3 and ends with WAEC's Senior Secondary Certificate Examination (SSCE) and, for university-bound students, JAMB's UTME.

JSS is uniform: every student in the country takes the same set of subjects. SS splits into three tracks (science, humanities, business) where students keep the four cores plus four to six track-specific subjects. The student must end SS with at least eight or nine subjects to satisfy WAEC's nine-paper entry requirement.

4. How the subject catalog is organised

NERDC groups subjects into four buckets: core (everyone must take it), track (mandatory once you have picked a stream: science, humanities, or business), trade (everyone picks one from a fixed list of six), and elective (a second language or art).

The same code is sometimes reused across class levels. For example, MTH is Mathematics at JSS and General Mathematics at SS. The naming and weighting differ but the code is stable, which is how schools track a student's progression across the six years.

5. Term and week model

Every Nigerian session has three terms: first term (September to December), second term (January to April), third term (April to July). Within each term, the NERDC scheme of work pre-allocates topics by week, typically 11 to 13 teaching weeks per term plus one revision week and one exam week.

The scheme is intentionally tight. A teacher who skips a week and tries to "catch up next term" cascades the delay into SS 3 third term, when WAEC begins. The single most common reason students sit WAEC unprepared is not laziness but a scheme of work that was never finished by the school.

6. Junior Secondary (JSS 1 – JSS 3) subjects

JSS subjects are the same across JSS 1, JSS 2, and JSS 3: the topics grow in complexity but the catalog does not change. Click into any subject for the full scheme of work.

7. Senior Secondary (SS 1 – SS 3) subjects

SS catalogs include the four cores plus track-specific subjects. A student picks one track in SS 1 and stays on it through SS 3. Trade subjects below carry across from JSS: students who already chose a trade in JSS 1 normally continue with it.

8. How NERDC schemes map to WAEC, NECO, and JAMB

Both WAEC and NECO publish their SSCE syllabus directly from the NERDC scheme of work. If a topic is in the NERDC scheme for SS 1 Biology, it can appear on the WAEC Biology paper. The reverse is also true: examiners are barred from setting questions on topics that are not in the NERDC syllabus. That is the strongest reason to finish the scheme.

JAMB's UTME syllabus is a curated subset of the SS NERDC scheme: usually about 60 to 70 percent of the SS 1–3 topics for each subject. JAMB drops the most lab-heavy content (because the UTME is CBT) and keeps the conceptual core. If a student has been taught the full NERDC scheme well, JAMB is comfortably within reach with about eight weeks of targeted past-question practice.

9. Sample lesson-note skeleton from a scheme entry

Take a single line from the SS 1 Biology NERDC scheme: Week 4, Cell Structure and Functions. The scheme gives the topic and the suggested duration. The lesson note is the teacher's expansion of that line into a 40-minute classroom session:

• Topic. Cell Structure and Functions.
• Class & duration. SS 1 · 40 minutes.
• Behavioural objectives. By the end of the lesson learners should be able to identify the major cell organelles, label a diagram of a plant and animal cell, and describe the function of each organelle in their own words.
• Previous knowledge. Pupils know what a cell is from JSS 3 Intermediate Science.
• Instructional materials. A printed microscope-view image, the smartboard slide, a labelled cell chart.
• Presentation. Step 1 set induction → Step 2 new vocabulary → Step 3 diagram labelling → Step 4 group function-match exercise.
• Evaluation. Five short-answer questions completed in the last seven minutes.
• Assignment. Draw and label a plant cell, hand in next lesson.

That is the full NERDC structure on one scheme entry. We unpack each part in the Nigerian lesson-note format guide.

10. Common gaps Nigerian schools have

We have audited curricula for over a hundred Nigerian schools while onboarding them to LearnStack. The same five problems show up in nearly all of them:

• Outdated schemes. Many schools are still running pre-2024 schemes that no longer list Digital Technologies or Citizenship and Heritage Studies as cores.
• Missing behavioural objectives. Lesson notes still say "students will know the parts of a cell" instead of "students will label a plant cell diagram", and inspectors flag it.
• Trade subjects taught as theory. The trade subject reform requires hands-on practical, but most schools deliver it as a chalk-and-talk subject because the equipment is missing.
• No vertical alignment. JSS Mathematics and SS General Mathematics are taught by different teachers who never compare schemes, so SS 1 ends up re-teaching content that JSS 3 already covered.
• No exam-back-mapping. Teachers run through the scheme in order but never tag which topics are highest-frequency in WAEC and JAMB, so exam-critical sessions get the same time as low-yield ones.

11. How LearnStack turns the scheme into teaching material

LearnStack ingests the NERDC scheme for your school's class levels and generates a full term's worth of NERDC-aligned lesson notes, smartboard slides, and quizzes: per subject, per class, per week. The same engine then runs WAEC and JAMB mock exams against the SS scheme so students see the same difficulty curve they will meet on paper.

What that means in practice: a Mathematics HOD can sit down on a Sunday afternoon, pick "JSS 1 Mathematics, NERDC 2024/2025 scheme", and have all 13 weeks of term-1 lesson notes plus slide decks ready for staff review on Monday morning. Mark schemes, assignment templates, and quiz banks come in the same flow.

12. Frequently asked questions