Dept prepares to roll out SBC

The Standard Based Curriculum is on target and will be rolled out in 2017 after the completion of elementary teacher guides and syllabus last week.

Assistant Secretary for Curriculum Development, Steven Tandale said Treid Print has won the bid to print and deliver the SBC materials to respective clusters which he expects to be delivered all throughout the country by the end of September this year.

“We have delivered the standard base curriculum for English, Mathematics and Culture and Community to Treid Print for printing now,” He said.

The SBC materials to be printed for elementary includes 3x Syllabus and 9x teacher guides which the three subjects will have three teacher’s guide respectively for Elementary Prep, Elementary one and Elementary two.

“English itself is a kit which will be printed by Tokiwa Printing which has got the syllabus, three teacher guide for EP, EP1 & EP2. Besides that we’ve got a kit that got a kit that’s got shelf books, journals, CD’s, SD cards, hand writing and picture cards and posters in that kit,” Said Tandale.

The English materials have been funded by Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (through AusAid) at a cost of almost K8Million.

Tandale said the documents have already been completed and will take approximately three to four weeks.

He stated that all the materials will be delivered throughout the country by treid print around October which he assumed will take about one month.

“By the end of October we expect all the materials to be in all the schools for implementation in 2017.

“In terms of training, clusters Training of Teachers has been completed in 13 provinces already in the beginning of the year. The nine provinces of Southern Highlands, Western Highlands, Simbu, Morobe, Northern, New Ireland, Western Province, West Sepik and Milne Bay. The budget for the nine remaining provinces for training has been cleared which is roughly around K6Million,”

He said the training of teachers for the 22 provinces will cost close to K12Million and will be completed by the end of August with reports and acquittals submitted by the end of September for teachers to be ready for full implementation in 2017.

Mr Tandale said that teachers have gone into training of SBC and has already gone ahead with planning with lessons using drafts of SBC which were given to them during training.

“What we are saying now is teachers are not waiting. They have gone into full soon as soon as training and development has been completed. You will notice that teachers will be well off come 2017 because they are have been planning for SBC in advance. I can assure the public that the government agenda for SBC is very well on target.

Tandale explained that with the new curriculum, English will be introduced as a subject of its own which is aimed at raising standards of students from Primary to high school.

“We want to have students who will be coming at the end of EP to be able to read and write better English before they interpret it when by the time they reach Primary and high school. Our teachers are also fully trained for that with the support of AusAid. What we are aiming for is to have the general performance of our students to be better than what it is or what it used to be. We will not have a dual curriculum, it is going to be only SBC from elementary to secondary,”

Tandale added that Primary school syllabus and teaching guides will be ready by the end of August to go into process of editing and graphics and will be printed by the end of the year with Secondary curriculum planning on the way.