Republika Srpska will adopt a unified curriculum with Serbia covering four key educational subjects from the start of the next school year.

The unified curriculum will apply to the so-called ‘national’ set of subjects – language, history, geography and knowledge of nature and society. The ‘national’ subjects are taught differently in Bosnian schools according to pupils’ ethnicity.

“I think the synchronisation is very good and we will be ready to do many things together with Serbia, especially those related to the protection of the national interests of the Serb people,” said Predrag Damjanovic, the director of the Republika Srpska Pedagogical Institute.

Damjanovic said that that the next step will be to synchronise the curriculum for secondary schools.

The Pedagogical Institute argued that the Serbian and Republika Srpska schoolbooks are already similar and that only a part of their content needs to be supplemented.

“We do not intend to hurt anyone by taking into account the protection of the identity of the Serbian people. We do not object to others doing the same. Since 2002, Bosniak students in Republika Srpska have had a national group of subjects, as well as students of Croat nationality [ethnicity],” Damjanovic told SRNA news Aagency.

The Pedagogical Institute said that announcement of the creation of a unified curriculum is connected to the so-called ‘Declaration on the Survival of the Serbian Nation’ which Serbia and Republika Srpska propose to sign at some point in the near future.

The text of the declaration, an idea proposed by Serbian and Republika Srpska Presidents Aleksandar Vucic and Milorad Dodik last August, has yet to be finalised or published.

It was announced that it would be signed on Serbia’s Statehood Day on February 15, but this did not happen.