Cooperation delivers textbooks

By SAMUEL BARIASI
PAPUA New Guinea will now have high quality national textbooks and teacher’s manuals for grades 3 to 6 for mathematics and science subjects.
The achievement is made possible under a cooperation between the Education Department and Japan International Cooperation Agency (Jica).
Education Minister Joseph Yopyyopy said the achievement was part of his department’s effort in reforming the PNG education system from the outcome-based to standards-based curriculum (SBC).
“One of the things I’ve announced when I took office was for every child to have a text book,” he said.
He said based on his announcement, a ‘one textbook per child’ policy was also introduced.
“Under SBC, we are now going to deliver mathematics and science textbooks to schools with the help of Japan,” he said.
He said he believed that having enough textbooks and making changes under SBC would improve the quality of education in the country.
He said a new project that would be worked on was the pre-service teacher education.
“This means that teachers in our teachers colleges will have teacher’s manuals to help in their training,” Yopyopy said.
He thanked the people and the government of Japan for their continuous support of education in PNG since 1990.
Jica human development director-general Jun Sakuma said he believed that the full implementation of SBC would contribute to achieving quality learning.
He said the project for improving the quality of mathematics and science education started in 2016 and ended last year.
“The journey was not always easy, but all parties worked together and now, under the SBC reform, we have developed PNG”s first national textbooks and teacher’s manuals for primary mathematics and science,” Sakuma said.
Sakuma and his Jica team and representatives from the Education Department visited two schools in the National Capital District to observe lessons taught from the new mathematics and science textbooks.