Over the weekend, I had the opportunity to accompany a friend who is a facilitator on the new GES Curriculum, to a workshop on the curriculum organised by one of the private schools for its teachers.

One of the facilitators made two statements that left me convinced that we are not ready as a nation to start the programme.

One of the statements was that GES had not printed any textbooks on the new curriculum. Another was that GES had not yet approved any textbooks on the curriculum.

According to the facilitator, the only thing available now is the curriculum itself and that teachers must find a way to teach based on the curriculum alone.

Apart from the unavailability of the textbooks, there has been hardly any training workshops that have been organised for the Junior High School teachers who are going to implement the programme in the classroom for the JHS 1 students.

Even though per the GES directives, the programme is to start for the JHS 1 students on the tenth week of the first semester ending March 26, 2021, no adequate preparation has been made.

Some of the more resourceful private schools have managed to organize training workshops for their teachers in readiness for the programme but the same cannot be said of the public basic schools and the less privileged private schools which are in the majority.

Beside, French and Arabic are mandatory subjects in this new curriculum. But only God knows where GES is going to find enough French and Arabic teachers for all the public basic schools in the country.

Even though the new curriculum looks well packaged to prepare our children to be able to compete globally, the difficulty is that we are not yet ready to start it.

It would be appropriate if GES shelves the programme for a while and embark on effective and thorough preparation to ensure smooth implementation in future.