A monitoring team from the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NaCCA) has commenced the inspection of textbooks used in public and private basic schools in Accra. The NaCCA officers visited the schools to verify whether the textbooks being used are approved and in line with the Council’s new curriculum, the Standard-Based Education curriculum. The schools visited were Mantse Tackie Cluster of Schools, Calvary Methodist 1 Basic School, and St Paul Lutheran Basic School. The team in their visits identified some textbooks that were not NaCCA certified but were being used in complementary to those of the Council for teaching. In some instances, those that were not certified by NaCCA were brought in by the schools to meet the inadequacy of those from the Council. Thus, since Ghana Education Service (GES) could not supply the schools with all the new curriculum books, the teachers had to get some textbooks from other publishers to meet the shortfall. There were those that were written on them approved by NaCCA or GES but were in reality not certified by the Council. Professor Edward Appiah, Director General of NaCCA, who led the team, said the move was to engage with the schools and sensitise them on NaCCA-approved books. He said they would continue the visits and sensitisation to other schools and bookshops to enable them to detect and do away with unauthorised textbooks in the system. Prof. Appiah hinted that the Council would be introducing QR codes on their approved books to enable schools to verify the authenticity of textbooks. He said they intended to avoid sole authorship of textbooks in the country, saying, for textbooks to be enriched, they needed to have three or more authors in addition to contributions. He added that Parliament would soon pass their Legislative Instrument which would enable them to proffer sanctions against those who published unauthorised textbooks. Madam Belinda Dede Sefakor-Bulley, Headteacher of Mantse Tackie One and Two Primary, appealed to the GES to provide the remaining textbooks to schools to address the challenges in accessing textbooks. She said GES had supplied them with English, Science and Mathematics textbooks and were left with Our World Our People, History, Religious and Moral Education, Creative Arts and Computing textbooks.
Source: Ghana News Agency
