The long awaited syllabi for senior secondary schools in The Gambia will be out come next academic year 2011/2012, as planned by Curriculum Development and Research Directorate of Ministry of Basic and Secondary Education (MOBSE).
According to the Principal Education Officer (PEO) for Curriculum Development and Research Directorate of MOBSE, Mr. Ousman Bah, the then High Schools and now Senior Secondary Schools had no teaching syllabi for this learning category under Ministry of Education even though the junior categories had their own. He stated that all along they had been dictated by West African Examination Council’s (WAEC) syllabus which is purely exam focus. “Though this has been conceptualized since independence but could not materialized due to unknown reasons”, Mr. Bah stated. He went on to say that most of the teachers in senior secondary schools are graduates from the universities most of whom had not under gone teacher training and do not understand the teaching pedagogies and as a result concentrate on how to make the students pass and disregard the understanding of the stuff given.
“If you have such teachers in your system”, according to Mr. Bah, “you need to have a document to guide them to understand the pedagogy of teaching”.  Another area of weakness he lamented on was the coming out with good credits in WAEC exams by students, but with little understanding of the subject areas. “The purpose of government’s investment on education is to produce people who would manage the affairs of this country in the future”, Mr. Bah informed teacher participants.
In lieu to this MOBSE and the conference of Principals had deemed it fit for the syllabi to be prepared through Curriculum Development and Research Directorate in consultation with senior secondary school teachers across the country, involving both public and private school teachers.
According to the PEO, Curriculum Directorate, he and his team is conducting a nationwide consultative review of the drafted syllabi for thirty-two examinable subjects in Gambia senior secondary schools. Ten of these had already been reviewed and this year they are reviewing nineteen and the remaining three would come later. The first region to conduct this second review of the syllabi documents was held at the offices of Regional Education Directorate (RED) one in Kanifing.
The second region to hold this review was in the premises of RED two. More than one hundred and thirty teachers from twenty-one schools within the region were invited for a two-day consultative workshop to review the documents.
In welcoming the participants on behalf of the Director RED2, Mr Gibril Bah, the Principal Education Officer RED2, had stressed the need and importance of this two-day workshop and advised them to take every stage of the workshop seriously as the  MOBSE will rely on their recommendation.
According to him, the participants would review the entire syllabi within two days and submit their recommendations to the personnels from Curriculum Development who will adjust the documents, compile them and recommend them to MOBSE for adaption. PEO Bah of RED2 informed participants that they are the first to interact with drafted syllabi and should enlighten others back in their schools and complement the new syllabi and discard the long time blame in the education fratertanity. He reminded the participants that they are representing the entire nation and not individual schools per se. Their role in these two days is to look in to a document which will replace the widely used WAEC syllabi as soon as everything finished.
The two-day reviewing of the drafted syllabi for senior schools witnessed an exercise of skills and knowledge from both Gambians and non-Gambians in the process of formulating unique syllabi for all the disciplines of studies in secondary education. The participants were grouped in to the categories of Arts, Commerce, Science and Technologies. The period marked the beginning of the dawn of a new era of our education system.
By next year, according to projections, our students in grade twelve would be examined based on these new syllabi. The teachers all around the country will make their deliberations base on the new syllabi which is designed in a way that even the untrained teachers would be able to teach effectively in classroom as everything was clearly indicated on the documents.
At the end of the two-day exercise, group suggestions and comments were made and they were noted well for action to be taken if accepted after scrutiny.  
What still remains unclear is the coverage period of the syllabi. Three academic years are still not sufficient to cover the entire syllabi for each subject from grade 10 to 12. When teachers are pressurized to meet 880 contact teaching hours, the highly anticipated understanding of the subject would still remain questionable. MOBSE, Curriculum Development and Research Directorate and the Conference of Principals should convene another consultative meeting and discuss on the modalities of covering the syllabi effectively and efficiently and within a convenient time frame.