On March 29, 2026, Nepal’s Ministry of Education, Science and Technology announced two significant policy shifts in quick succession: the cancellation of formal examinations for students up to Grade 5, and a ban on bridge courses and entrance preparation classes taken after the Secondary Education Examination (SEE). The ban on bridge course announcement was followed almost immediately by a minister's clarification narrowing its scope and revised after public confusion, but the episode left a more unsettling question hanging in the air, one that had little to do with the policies themselves.
How is it possible that the foundational structure of a nation’s education system be rewritten in a day?
A Policy Debate Worth Having
The substance of both decisions deserves fair consideration. The argument against heavy examination loads in primary school is not without merit. Developmental educators have long cautioned that high-stakes testing in early childhood can breed anxiety rather than curiosity, and that children between Grades 1 and 5 are better served by formative, classroom-based assessment than by standardized exams. Nepal’s curriculum load at the primary level has, by many accounts, been disproportionate to the age groups it serves.
The bridge course ban, meanwhile, was framed as a move against the commercialization of education, a concern that is both legitimate and widely shared. Bridge courses, which help SEE graduates transition into +2 level science, management, or humanities programs, have become a significant private industry. Critics argue they create an uneven playing field, favoring students whose families can afford the fees while disadvantaging those in rural or underserved communities.
These are real conversations worth having. The problem is not that the government had them. The problem is how they were resolved.
The Numbers Behind the Ban
Before evaluating whether the ban on bridge courses was the right call, it is worth understanding the landscape it was meant to address.
Beauties, build the thick skin
According to the Ministry of Education’s own 2081 B.S. flash report, the survival rate to Grade 10 in Madhesh Province stands at 66.1 percent. By Grade 12, that number falls sharply to just 27 percent, a drop of more than half from the Grade 10 level. The declining pattern repeats across all seven provinces. Students are not simply choosing to leave; they are being lost at each transition point, and the drop between SEE completion and Grade 12 enrolment is among the steepest.
The UNESCO Institute for Statistics defines survival rate as the percentage of a cohort enrolled in the first grade of a given education level who are expected to reach a specified grade, regardless of repetition. By that measure, Nepal loses nearly three-quarters of its students before they complete higher secondary education.
Bridge courses exist, in large part, because of this gap. They have emerged as a coping mechanism for a transition that the public system has not been equipped to manage. As one educator and commentator observed on social media, the presence of a robust preparatory course industry is not evidence of greed, it is evidence of a need that the state is failing to meet.
“Critics have pointed out business opportunities only exist when there is a need for a product or service that isn’t being met. The fact that there is a robust industry to prepare students for exams should indicate that the majority of them lack the confidence to take a crack at them without additional support.”
Not all students who enroll in bridge courses are from affluent families with access to extra resources, and for those who do, the discontinuation of such programs may have little impact since they have the means to seek private tutoring as an alternative. Many are students from marginalized communities, moving to the capital for the first time, switching from a familiar educational environment to an unfamiliar one, or simply grappling with the self-doubt that comes from years receiving a substandard education. For them, a group bridge course, far more affordable than private tuition, is often the only lifeline connecting a public-school education and the demands of higher study.
Dismantling that scaffolding without replacing it does not solve the problem of educational inequality. It deepens it.
The more constructive path would be to regulate the industry to protect students from predatory institutions, subsidize students through state funding, create free and accessible preparation courses, and, most critically, strengthen the core schooling system so that bridge courses become less necessary over time and not banned before that foundation exists.
The Structural Problem No Policy Can Fix Alone
The bridge course debate, important as it is, is in some ways a symptom of a deeper problem: Nepal’s education policy has no structural insulation from political change.
When a new government forms, it inherits the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology. When the ministry changes hands, policy changes with it. There are no formal mechanisms requiring consultation with educators, researchers, or civil society before major reforms are announced. There is no independent body with the standing to say: this needs more evidence, more time, more input from the people it will affect.
For a democracy, this is a fragile arrangement. Education is not merely a service the state provides. It is the mechanism through which citizens learn to participate in democracy itself, learn how to read, reason, question authority, and understand their rights. A system in which that mechanism can be reconfigured by a single ministerial decision, without independent oversight, without legislative debate, without structured input from educators, is a system vulnerable to the full spectrum of political possibilities including those at the darker end.
The Case for an Independent Education Council
What Nepal needs is not a different minister or political parties making better decisions. It needs a structure that makes education policy more resilient than any single minister and political party.
An independent National Education Council modelled on similar bodies in countries including Finland, South Korea, and the United Kingdom would sit between the Ministry of Education and the implementation of major policy reforms. Its membership would include educators, curriculum specialists, child development researchers, representatives from each province, and members of civil society. It would not replace the ministry; the minister would retain executive authority. But any reform with significant implications for curriculum, assessment, or access would require the council’s formal recommendation before implementation.
Members would serve fixed, staggered terms, ensuring continuity across election cycles. Removal would require documented cause and legislative review not a change of government. The council’s deliberations and recommendations would be public, creating a layer of accountability that ministerial decisions currently lack.
Education policy moves slowly by necessity. Children experience it in real time, across years of their development. A misguided policy cannot simply be patched in the next budget cycle; it shapes the trajectories of an entire cohort of students. The institutional design of education governance should reflect that weight.
A Question of Stakes
Nepal is not alone in facing these pressures. Across the world, observers have noted with concern the ease with which education systems — particularly the teaching of history, civic values, and critical thinking — can be reshaped when political authority is sufficiently concentrated and institutional constraints are sufficiently weak.
The concern is not that any party in Nepal today intends harm. The concern is structural: that a system designed to be this responsive to political change will, over time, be shaped by the full range of political forces that pass through it. History teaches that those forces are not always benign.
Education is, in the end, the domain in which a society reproduces itself — its knowledge, its values, its understanding of what it has been and what it intends to become. That domain deserves more protection than a single signature can undo.
The question Nepal now faces is not merely whether to ban bridge courses or cancel primary exams. It is whether the country is prepared to entrust the future of its education entirely to those who wield political power in the coming years.
