FG bans 25% textbooks, sets 70% pass mark for school books
The Federal Government has drawn a fresh battle line against substandard textbooks in Nigerian schools, declaring that instructional materials scoring below 70 per cent will no longer qualify for national ranking.
The new standard followed the first-ever national textbook assessment and ranking exercise conducted by the Nigerian Educational Research and Development Council, NERDC, which exposed disturbing quality gaps in books submitted for use in Nigerian classrooms, with some scoring as low as 25 per cent.
Receiving the assessment report and ranked list in Abuja on Friday, Minister of Education, Dr. Tunji Alausa, said the government could no longer tolerate the use of poorly written, inaccurate or curriculum-incompatible textbooks to educate Nigerian children.
In a blunt assessment of the situation, Alausa declared that some textbooks currently finding their way into primary and secondary schools were simply unacceptable.
The minister said: “Some of the books being used in our schools, primary schools, junior secondary schools and senior secondary schools are trash. Some of these books are scoring 25 per cent or lower. Is this the way our children should be educated? If this happened with the government, it will not happen with this government.”
Alausa said the 70 per cent threshold was deliberately introduced to ensure that only textbooks meeting acceptable quality standards would make the national ranked list.
According to him, the exercise was not intended to cripple the publishing industry but to establish a transparent quality-control mechanism capable of protecting Nigerian learners from materials that could undermine learning outcomes.
He urged publishers whose books failed to meet the benchmark to study the assessment results, correct identified deficiencies and resubmit their materials for consideration.
“I’m giving you the olive branch,” the Minister told publishers, while commending those who participated in the exercise despite what he described as pressure and blackmail.
The development comes against the backdrop of the revised national curriculum introduced in September 2025, with the Federal Government seeking to ensure that textbooks and other instructional materials keep pace with the new curriculum.
Alausa explained that NERDC had developed a standardised textbook assessment toolkit, benchmarked against international best practices, to evaluate the suitability of instructional materials being presented for use in Nigerian schools.
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