The Ukrainian students, who will master the new curriculum for the 8th form, will be completely provided with textbooks by 1st September”, stated Lilia Grinevich, the Minister of Education, in the conference that was held in the House of Government these days. The domestic publishers, that are working on the state order this year, have also confirmed their willingness to timely delivery of the textbooks to schools.

Kharkiv-based Publishing House RANOK was the first who coped with completing of the state order for the textbooks for the 8th form. They informed about that on their Facebook page.

“32 items with total print run of 1 751 807 copies according to the new curriculum for the 8th form have been already published in full. The textbooks have been issued in the Russian and the Ukrainian languages. “Bukrek” and “Mir” partner publishers currently prepare the translations of Physics, History of Ukraine and World history textbooks into the Hungarian, the Moldavian, the Romanian, the Polish languages. 82 employees of Publishing House RANOK, 42 authors and 63 other experts: photographers, artists, illustrators and designers had been working on this project. 268 reviewers have sent their comments. All the editions have passed the gender expertise and expertise of MES”, reported in Publishing House RANOK.

According to the information from the Ministry of Education, this year the issue of textbooks for the 8th forms for secondary schools of general education of Ukraine has been financed in full amount and on time. That’s why the money of the overall amount of 360 mln UAH, covering the issue of 220 items of the textbooks with print run of 7 760 164 copies have been credited to the accounts of publishers at the beginning of June, 2016.

As Ms Grinevich says, in contrast to the textbooks for the 4th and 7th forms, 50 per cent of which had to be issued under the financing from local budgets last year, the textbooks for the 8th forms have been financed centrally.

In view of a range of inconsistencies, the question of issuing the textbooks for the 4th and 7th forms has not been moved forward yet. The Ministry of Education looks for ways of the solution to the problem, which primarily is in financing. The point is about 42,9 millions which local budgets have to set aside for the textbooks issuing.

According to the forecast of Aleksey Poltoratskiy, the director of the department of education and science of Dnipropetrovsk RSA, not all Publishing Houses, being school textbooks suppliers, will manage to issue the textbooks before a new academic year starts. He expressed his concern during the above-mentioned press-conference. “This is true, the textbooks for the 8th form started arriving to regional centres of education, but the process goes very slowly, not all publishers and printing houses can cope with the state order”, Poltoratskiy pointed out.

Besides as Viktor Kruglov, the director of Publishing House RANOK concludes, “at the moment all the textbooks by RANOK have been delivered to regional centres of Ukraine. But the problem with timely delivery to schools still can arise. The textbooks, delivered to the regions, have to wait for products from other publishers, and only then they will be sent together to area centres”.

In any case let’s be optimistic as for the future, because today Ukrainian publishers and printing houses work at the maximum capacity.