Mr. Festus Longmatey, the National Programmes Manager of the Ghana National Education Campaign Coalition, has divulged that a survey being contacted by the Coalition has revealed that, no school in six regions of the country has received a single textbook from government, in the past three years.
After three years of implementing a new curriculum without textbooks, amid occassional shortage of chalk and other essential teaching and learning materials, the spokesperson of the Education Ministry, Kwesi Kwarteng, showed up at the beginning of 2022 to announce that the distribution of textbooks for the new curriculum would start in March 2022.
President Nana Addo announced the implementation in September 2019 and indicated that the new curriculum would focus on making children confident, innovative, creative thinkers, digitally literate, well-rounded and patriotic citizens; but the reality is that pupils are direct victims of the frustrations of teachers who do not have the learning materials to teach.
The Akufo Addo led government was expected to distribute textbooks to the various public basic schools in the country, to help in teaching and learning using the new curriculum. However, as the Minister of Education has admitted sometime ago, there have been difficulties with procurement and distribution of books, leaving teachers and students to provide for themselves.
Speaking in an interview, the Programmes Manager made known that it is rather unfortunate that the Ministry of Education, has failed to solve the problem, three years after introducing a new curriculum.
“When it comes to the issue of textbooks, for three years now we have come out with a new standard based curriculum. We all expect that at least this should go with corresponding teaching and learning materials for teachers to be able to teach our children in pursuit of delivering the kind of quality education that we want. It is unfortunate that we should hear from our minister that we still have a lot of the text books not going.
“Now as a coalition we have also, you know, anything that we do we try to gather evidence on the ground. So as we speak right now, currently our people are on the ground collecting data, information, to verify that really schools have received textbooks. So far, information reaching us so far indicates that no school so far entered has received any form of textbook.”
Festus
According to Mr festus longmatey, “We are doing this in about six regions across the country; Greater Accra inclusive, we have the Central Region, we have the Savannah Region, Bono East and the Ashanti Regions. So far they are still collecting the data, but the data we are collecting so far indicates that no school so far has received any textbook.”
“They don’t have at all; no school entered so far has a textbook. It is only in one school that there is an indication that some text books have arrived at the district education office but those textbooks are yet to be supplied to the schools. So clearly there is a challenge and this needs to be fixed and fixed as early as we can.”
Festus
New Curriculum Saga
The future of the nation’s educational set-up looks very worrying. The various sector stakeholders strongly believe Dr. Adutwum acknowledges the relevance of textbooks in the process of implementing a new curriculum effectively in the basic schools; however, the political will to execute this very important policy has been in limbo for the past three years.
There have been several dates announced by either the Education Minister, Dr. Adutwum, or the communication team of the ministry of education which sincerely, time has proven that the people of Ghana should have taken those announcements with a pinch of salt.
It will be recalled that the President of the Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT), Dr. Isaac Owusu, in 2022 revealed that the lack of textbooks and government’s refusal to pay capitation grants has crippled basic education.
According to him, teachers and their heads are struggling to cope.
“The new curriculum that was introduced in 2019 was ideally to come with its own textbooks that the teachers will use.
“It is not that GES or the Ministry of Education did a supply and there have been shortages, there has not been any supply at all. So since 2019, from kindergarten to class six do not have textbooks.”
Dr Owusu
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