Schools in Ghana will soon have access to textbooks for the new curriculum. This assurance was given by the Acting Director General for the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NaCCA) at a stakeholder consultative meeting NaCCA held with Book Publishers in Kumasi on Tuesday.
Mr. John Mensah Annan also explained that preparations are on course to train teachers on the new curriculum in order to enable them deliver as expected of them.
“You can’t implement a curriculum without accompanying textbooks. The practice however is that writers can only produce text books after curriculum experts have developed the curriculum. By practice, they have a minimum of eighteen months within which to write a book, trial test, proofread, quality assure it before it is printed” he explained and cited previous occasions where curriculum has been rolled out without textbooks and emphasized that it is the norm.
He cautioned publishers who fail to follow the laid down procedures on the publishing of content for Ghanaian pupils and also congratulated the CEO of Rainbow Publications; Mr. John Akwasi Amponsah for an amazing event.
The meeting, held at the Christian Village, near Opoku Ware Senior High School was on the theme “CCP Curriculum and its implementation: the role of the Publisher”.
In all, close to one hundred participants, mostly publishers, attended the programme and were taken through some requirements expected of publishers in the implementation of the Common Core Programme (CCP) for JHS 1 (Basic 7) to JHS3 (Basic 9) in the 2021/2022 academic year.
Chief Executive Officer of Rainbow Publications Limited; Mr. John Akwasi Amponsah; one of the organizers of the event in an interview with journalists explained that the programme is very relevant as it will beef up the capacities of the publishers to enable them publish books that are wholesome for pupils and relevant to the curriculum.
He appreciated NaCCA for placing private publishers at the centre of education and called on other publishers to get in touch with NaCCA and seek approval for their work before taking their books to the market. He promised more books of exceptional quality from Rainbow Publications.
For his part; Saint Godson Kwasi Baah; CEO of Afrafra Ventures and Publications Limited in Kumasi expressed excitement at the success of the event and explained that the knowledge shared by NaCCA officials at the forum was invaluable and will be felt in Ghana’s education soon.
The first leg of the consultative meeting, attended by over 70 publishers was held on Friday 10th September, 2021 in Accra.
