The Director General of NACCA, Prof Edward Appiah, has announced that some of the basic schools easily fall victim to the purchase of unapproved textbooks, hinting that all new textbooks with effect from September this year would have QR codes.
This move he said was to alert prospective book buyers to know which books have been approved by NACCA so they would know which ones to buy or not.
Prof. Appiah announced this when he led a team of staff from NACCA to visit some selected public and private basic schools in Accra recently.
The unannounced visits were aimed at knowing first-hand the nature of textbooks being used in public and private basic schools in the country.
The trip took them to the Mantse Tachie Basic, Nii Amugi Basic and St. Paul’s Lutheran School and other basic schools in the Metropolis.
He indicated that it was very difficult for Public Basic Schools to use unapproved textbooks.
According to him, this was because textbooks for public schools were supplied by the government through the Ghana Education Service, adding that it was only the private basic schools who buy textbooks directly from publishers or from the open market.
He was upbeat that the bar codes would help control the influx of unapproved textbooks into the market and also prevent parents and other users from patronizing them.
Prof. Appiah stated the monitoring of the textbooks would be extended to the various regions to ascertain the state of approved textbooks available in schools in the various regions across the country.
He cautioned head teachers not to allow booksellers to influence them to buy unproved textbooks for their pupils since it could have an impact on their education if there were infractions of wrong information in the manuscript or the book.
Prof. Appiah stated that NACCA would soon begin a nationwide sensitization on how to identify approved and unapproved books among other policies.
“There is a Legislative Instrument currently at the Attorney General Department and would be placed in parliament very soon for consideration and this would impose heavy punishment for selling unapproved books to schools”, He said.
The Director General explained further that the new law will also sanction publishers who persistently flout the laws and such people would be blacklisted from the industry by law.
The Director General attributed the influx of unapproved textbooks in the system to a lack of enough punitive measures by the laws, so they keep doing some of these things. END
