NaCCA begins nationwide inspection of textbooks used in schools

The Director-General of the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NaCCA), Prof Edward Appiah and his team starting from Greater Accra have begun inspection of textbooks used in public and private basic schools.

The textbooks inspection according to the Council for Curriculum and Assessment is to verify whether the textbooks being used were approved and in line with the Council’s new curriculum, the Standard-Based Education curriculum.

The monitoring team led by the Director-General of NaCCA, Professor Edward Apphia visited schools including Mantse Tackie Cluster of Schools, Calvary Methodist 1 Basic School, and St Paul Lutheran Basic School in Accra.

The team in their visits identified some textbooks that were not National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NaCCA) certified but were being used in complementary to those of the Council for teaching purposes.

The Director-General of the Assessment and Curriculum 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.

He said the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment is working 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 textbook publishers or those who published unauthorised textbooks for sale in the open market.

In a related development, the management of the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NaCCA) says it will soon begin a nationwide sensitization on how to identify unapproved and approved textbooks among other policies.

Ahead of the sensitization exercise on how to identify whether a school textbook has been approved or not, it said all new textbooks for basic schools with effect from September this year will have Quick Response (QR) codes.

The QR or bar code it said is to alert prospective book buyers to know which books have been approved by National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NACCA) so they would know which ones to buy or not.

The Director of the National Curriculum Council commenting on the technology also said the QR or bar codes would help control the influx of unapproved textbooks into the market and also prevent parents and other users from patronizing them.