Engaging Foreign Curriculum Experts in Curriculum Design: A Case Study of Primary School Curriculum Change in Lesotho

Involvement of foreign consultants in the Lesotho curriculum design has been in operation since the beginning of formal education around 1833 in the country to-date. The expectation was that, with time, Lesotho would produce enough quality curriculum specialists who would be entrusted with the task of curriculum design. However, the trained citizens continued to engage foreign consultants in curriculum design. This paper presents some of the reasons for continued engagement of foreign consultants in the Lesotho curriculum centre. The study is a case study in which a qualitative approach was used as the conceptual framework to interrogate the value of curriculum specialists mandated to design the Lesotho curriculum. Data used in this study were solicited from one-on-one interviews of curriculum specialists. The findings reveal one of the main reasons for engaging foreign consultants as lack of training for newly employed curriculum specialists while on the other hand, less qualified and inexperienced curriculum specialists are employed which led to a huge staff turnover due to unfavourable working conditions in the Lesotho curriculum development centre. This resulted in the lack of knowledge of curriculum design where curriculum specialists took too long to design a low quality curriculum.