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The Communications Director of the Ministry of Education, Kwasi Kwarteng, has defended the sector’s delay in the supply of textbooks to the various educational levels in the country.
He stated that the Ministry noticed some fundamental problems facing the education system that Ghana practices, to which it was keen to make effective changes, hence the implementation of the new curriculum.
This comes after an announcement that the Ministry of Education will take delivery of 3,742,624 textbooks from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Tuesday, August 23, 2022.
Explaining the reason for the delay, he said GES has to rethink the education system by reviewing the curriculum to effect changes in its content for students.
“If you take a look at how we trained our children here, we trained them to read and write however after they [pupils] had finished in the reading and writing method then they forget what they learned. So if you take a look at this cycle of education system or approach we used to train them we are not going to get anyone who can use education to change the fortunes of the country.
“Which means fundamentally, from the start, there is a fundamental problem in the education system that we practice and if there is a fundamental problem then there was the need to put in place measures to change the fundamentals to enable us to get better results in the future.
“How do you do it, you have to rethink the education, and rethinking the education would mean that you have to even do curriculum reviews so that the content used to teach the children have some changes,” Mr Kwarteng said on the Anopa Bofo morning show Monday, August 22, 2022, hosted by Kwamina Sam Biney.
The implementation of the curriculum, Mr Kwarteng emphasised it was not “incidents nor events” but a process which has led to the delay in the supply of the textbooks to add the quality components to the curriculum.
“Part of the processes is implementing quality components and other things that would complement the curriculum to be successful and one of them the critical and crucial ones is the issue of textbooks.
“The ministry had some delays which we apologise for and take responsibility for that but in all these, it was for good.
According to him, the delay was to raise the quality assurance team to make sure nothing but “quality was provided” before publication to avoid any hindrance and challenges.
The communication Director disclosed that the ministry’s priority has always been ensuring the educational system in Ghana possesses the three fundamental basics to education namely; “access, quality, and opportunity.”
In all, 11,135 schools under the Ghana Accountability for Learning Outcomes Project (GALOP) will benefit from the distribution, which will include 1,214,347 Primary One to Three pupils.
In addition, a publisher, Prof. Quarm, has also distributed 275,000 books for classes One to Six, while 629,755 Creative Arts books for classes One to Three and 43,832 teachers’ guides would be sent to the schools.
York Press is also distributing 246,633 science textbooks for classes One to Six and 14,217 teachers’ guides.
