After regaining Latvia’s independence, a path of change has been started in education. Certain stages can be noted in it, which significantly affect the development of the educational content. The article explains changes related to the content of general education, based on three steps of change — the idea, its implementation, and results. The last significant change in the content of general education is the development of the competency approach in sample curricula and its implementation in school practice. It is possible already to judge about its results, because there are the first school leavers who have studied according to these programmes. The first conclusions point to the need to further improve the new curricula by structuring it more thoughtfully in order to achieve the desired result — students’ competence to use the acquired knowledge and skills in diverse situations