Schools receive new guidelines for teaching English

SCHOOLS have been issued with new guidelines for teaching English because of difficulties with the existing curriculum, which has been in place since 1999.

In a document sent to the country’s 3,300 primary schools this week, the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) said many teachers had found it difficult to use the curriculum’s planning structures.

The introduction of the revised primary curriculum was cited by teachers this week as one of many additional challenges in schools over the past seven years. They were responding to a literacy report which showed little or no improvement in reading standards among fifth-class pupils between 1998 and 2004.