The research reported in this symposium proposal is based on a component of a larger research project that was an independent review of the primary school curriculum renewal exercise that was carried out in Trinidad and Tobago (T&T) under the Seamless Education System (SES), which is a programme sponsored by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). The review examines how agencies functioned to engender educational change through education governance systems in the process of revising the primary school curriculum. The term “agencies” refers to sections/units/divisions and personnel within the national education governing body, the Ministry of Education (MoE), that were involved in the revision process. The research shows that although the Core Planning Team was committed to the change process and had a plan to implement the change that included stakeholder participation, training, evaluation and monitoring of the process, turbulence occurred at various stages of the review process. The impetus for curriculum change was a result of taking advantage of the collective desire by education stakeholders to have a curriculum that served the needs of all students and promoted equity. Additionally, there is evidence that some members of the curriculum writing team felt that engagement in the curriculum development process was rewarding and that making a contribution to the development of a more meaningful primary curriculum was empowering, even though the process was taxing. Still, the degree of turbulence at times was overwhelming and did thwart some of the change efforts. For example, the cascading that occurred within the writing teams without a full grasp of the concept of an integrated thematic curriculum. Further turbulence led to the abandonment of the Curriculum Implementation Support Team, which was an important agency for the implementation process of the curriculum renewal. The Core Planning Team was left powerless, without resources to enable the work of the unit and having to follow the political directorate’s mandate to roll out the curriculum at the national level instead of at the level of a pilot as had been planned. These socio-political contextual factors complicated, and to some extent inhibited the curriculum development process, causing much turbulence in the process.

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