Minister promises textbook delivery by April

BABOKI KAYAWE
Staff Writer | Wednesday May 1, 2013 00:00

The minister had called the meeting to address a number of issues, especially the dismal results of 2012 Junior Certificate Examinations.

Public junior secondary schools nationwide have had no prescribed textbooks since 2011, a situation MoESD has blamed on a protracted court battle between the ministry and two publishing companies, Pentagon and Medi Publishers.

The companies had wanted MoESD to review and set aside a decision of the evaluation board that degraded and disqualified several books they published.

The ministry's principal public relations officer, Oarabile Phefo, has also said textbook supplies to junior schools were interrupted by the litigation which was only resolved at the end of last year.

'We have started supplying textbooks to some schools and the situation is expected to normalise soon,' Phefo said.

He added that only junior secondary schools were affected because a new curriculum was being introduced at the time. Asked about the interventions they took to reduce the effects of the shortage, Phefo said most of the modules - about 85 percent - were covered using old textbooks. 'The curriculum did not completely change,' he said 'Only a few areas such as life skills and ICT were added and the old textbooks were still relevant.'

He emphasised that primary schools were not affected, except for a few isolated cases owing to delays from councils that were identified in a monitoring and assessment exercise. 

In 2010, Clearcut Investment (Pty) Ltd. and Deadline Print Brokers (Pty) Ltd., trading as Pentagon and Medi Publishers, complained to MoESD over its lack of support for local companies in the award of tenders for school books that are estimated to be worth approximately P300 million annually.

The two contended that most of their books were unfairly disqualified and degraded in the preparation of a prescriptions list for Form Two.

In their affidavit, the two publishers had laid out a number of factors that, in their view, had motivated them to believe that their books ought to have been qualified as core books.

They cited indiscretion on the part of evaluators, leakage of information to publishers, unprocedural submission of materials, indiscretion in the evaluation exercise, unjustified variation of ITT (Invitation To Tender) documents and conflict of interest in respect of the Acting Director of the Department of Curriculum Development and Evaluation who participated in the evaluation exercise who was also an interested party as an author of school books.