ABUJA, NIGERIA– The Nigerian Educational Research Study and Development Council (NERDC) has actually begun a thorough overhaul of the nation’s textbook examination system.
The regulative body has mandated all educational publishers and academic stakeholders to immediately resubmit training products for an aggressive phase of evaluation, re-evaluation, and public ranking under a freshly developed quality control structure.
The vibrant directive was consisted of in a main public notice signed by the Executive Secretary of the NERDC, Prof. Salisu Shehu.
The declaration formally flagged off Stage 1 of the 2026 Book Examination and Ranking Workout, characterising the programmatic shift as part of more comprehensive federal reforms to sanitise basic education and get rid of subpar educational literature from school racks.
Introducing Competitive Ranking Metrics
The hallmark of the freshly introduced quality framework is a competitive ranking system embedded straight within the statutory approval procedure.
Unlike the previous binary “approved or rejected” setup, the 2026 procedures will examine books across multiple quality vectors, designating a performance score to each instructional resource.
Read Likewise: Federal government raises committee on textbooks for schools.
The council kept in mind that the ranking system was introduced to foster healthy, market-driven competition among educational publishers, forcing authors and printers to raise their editorial, typographical, and pedagogical requirements.
Most importantly, the regulative upgrade requireds that all textbooks, including those that previously scaled through internal evaluations and held existing approval licenses, should be resubmitted for fresh profiling under the newly validated national benchmarks.
To avoid administrative bottlenecks, the apex instructional research council has segmented the nationwide auditing procedure into three strategic functional blocks.
Phase 1, which opens right away, will focus totally on core textbooks and foundational instructional resources targeting essential transition tiers: Main 1, Main 4, Junior Secondary School 1 (JSS 1), and Senior Secondary School 1 (SSS 1). Subsequent phases will cover the staying intermediate class levels.
Below are the critical submission windows for Phase 1:
-
Opening Date for Registration: Monday, June 8, 2026.
-
Final Closing Due Date: Friday, June 19, 2026.
-
Late Submission Policy: The Council alerted that the submission window is outright, and late entries will not be entertained under any circumstances.
-
Evaluation Completion Date: Friday, July 31, 2026.
Professor Shehu explicitly prompted publishers, corporate authors, industrial printers, and major suppliers to download the thorough Book Quality Guidelines and Submission Treatment manual straight from the validated NERDC digital website to avoid technical disqualification at eviction.
The assessment panel, drawing specialists from the Book Development Centre and various Nigerian universities, is expected to wrap up the physical and contextual analysis of all sent materials by July 31, 2026.
Immediately following the conclusion of the audit, the council will release an extensive, ranked directory of approved learning resources, which will work as the mandatory procurement guide for public and independent schools ahead of the upcoming 2026/2027 scholastic session.