The Ministry of Education and Research has initiated public consultations on the draft textbooks submitted by publishing houses to obtain the “Approved for Printing”. All the interested persons, including teachers and students, are invited to consult the draft textbooks on the Ministry’s website in the section “Transparency” and to give feedback by filling in the form dedicated to each book, IPN reports.

At a press conference, state secretary of the Ministry of Education and Research Galina Rusu said that by holding public consultations on the textbooks, the Ministry wants to exclude any potential scientific or grammatical error or possible wrong answers.

“The textbooks are prepared one by one, which means that we will continue to complete the list of proposed textbooks so that towards the end of this school year and, respectively, the beginning of the next year, we will offer the new edited textbooks to students. At this stage, we think that, based on all the evaluation parameters within the procurement, we will propose more than 40 titles of new textbooks for the 2024-2025 school year,” said the secretary of state.

All the draft textbooks offered by national publishing houses were evaluated by a group of three-five persons selected through an open competition. The group includes teachers with teaching degrees, with scientific-teaching titles, with experience and performances in the field. “We ascertained that some of the textbooks were already rejected as non-compliant with the curriculum or because they didn’t accumulate 80% of the total score for a draft textbook, as the regulations stipulate, while all textbooks that obtained the necessary score and the highest score in public procurement, which consists both of the quality score and the price score, were repeatedly sent to publishers for necessary adjustments and editing. The adjustments and editing, in accordance with the recommendations of the evaluation committee, were made by the publishing houses and now we are at the stage when the publishing house presented the textbook for obtaining the print approval,” explained Galina Rusu.

As part of the 2024 procurement, the Ministry aims to purchase 67 titles of school textbooks. For 46 of these, 64 bids were submitted.