Accra’s public and private basic schools’ textbooks are currently being inspected by a monitoring team from the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NaCCA).
The schools visited were Mantse Tackie Cluster of Schools, Calvary Methodist 1 Basic School, and St Paul Lutheran Basic School.
During the places they visited, the team discovered certain textbooks that were not NaCCA accredited but were being used in conjunction with those of the Council for instruction.
In some cases, persons who were not certified by NaCCA were brought in by the schools to compensate for the Council’s deficiencies.
Because Ghana Education Service (GES) was unable to provide all of the new curriculum books for the schools, the teachers were forced to purchase some textbooks from other publishers to make up the difference, a teacher stated.
There were those that were written on them approved by NaCCA or GES, but were in reality not certified by the Council.
The team was led by Professor Edward Appiah, Director General of NaCCA. He explained that the goal was to interact with the schools and inform them about NaCCA-approved textbooks.
To enable them to find and get rid of unapproved textbooks in the system, he said they will continue the visits and sensitization to more schools and bookshops.
Prof. Appiah made a suggestion that the Council would add QR codes to the approved books so that schools could confirm the legitimacy of the textbooks.
He stated that they wished to avoid the sole authorship of textbooks in the nation, stating that three or more authors were required in addition to contributions for textbooks to be richer.
He added that Parliament would soon pass their Legislative Instrument which would enable them 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.
