Vice President of IMANI Centre for Policy and Education, Selorm Branttie has advised the government to return to the old curriculum until it comes up with a well-strategised plan for the implementation of a new one.

According to him, the challenges government is encountering in providing resources for primary schools is because it had not probably drafted the new curriculum.

“Curriculum research and development takes many years to develop and usually when you want to run a system like this, where you want to change over into a new system, you would have planned already, maybe a couple of years in advance what you needed to do,” he said.

He was reacting to the Deputy Minister of Education, Rev Ntim Fordjour’s promise to provide textbooks for the new curriculum to all schools in all regions within 90 days, which is yet to be done.

Speaking in an interview with JoyNews on Tuesday, Mr. Branttie explained that although it has been months since the new curriculum was rolled out, government’s inability to provide stationery creates the impression that it had not properly carried out research for the curriculum.

“So it looks like either the Ministry rushed into the whole curriculum planning thing or they were misinformed about the logistics required on the ground or they were just probably extremely clueless about it,” he stressed.

Expressing worry about the trend, he said it was “a very sorry spectacle, the fact that the future of this country is receiving very little of the most important tool that they would require to be able to sustain themselves or actually build the country.”

Mr. Branttie added that this phenomenon would only widen the knowledge gap amongst the less privileged students.

“For three years now and possibly for the next year or two. It means that even by the time the textbooks come, they will need extra time to catch up with other classmates from other more privileged parts of the country and these are the things that actually deepen the poverty divide,” he bemoaned.