The delivery of textbooks to schools from the warehouses of the Könyvtárellátó Nonprofit Kft. (Kello) began on Tuesday, the State Secretary for Public Education of the Ministry of the Interior (BM) announced in Üllő.
Zoltán Maruzsa said that schools ordered 12.5 million textbooks in the spring, and another million copies are expected to be ordered by the end of the year. He reminded us: textbooks are given to everyone free of charge.
For more than four months, he said, “we have been producing non-stop”, mainly in Debrecen, at Alföldi Nyomda, but the textbooks also had to be prepared for the production.
The list of public education and vocational training textbooks for the 2023/24 academic year includes 2,313 teaching aids from 36 publishers. 60 percent of this is published by the state, and 40 percent is the product of non-state publishers. For this year’s order, the Office of Education (OH) renewed 130 textbooks, mainly for the fourth, eighth and twelfth grades. Of the 130 new teaching aids, 57 are general knowledge, 9 are foreign language, 23 are nationality and 41 SEN (special educational needs) textbooks – he explained.
He drew attention to the fact that the items to be delivered now complete a significant development. The amendments to the National Core Curriculum, amended in 2020, are introduced in an ascending system, and the school year starting now is the last year of this introduction; students can study from the renewed textbooks in the 4th, 8th and 12th grades as well.
Zoltán Maruzsa also spoke about the fact that since the beginning of 2020, the Education Office has updated 1,259 textbooks, of which 327 general knowledge textbooks, 599 nationality textbooks and 252 high school textbooks.
Digital developments are still ongoing – he said – 264 smart textbooks are already available on the National Public Education Portal.
Zsolt Tőczik, the managing director of Kello, reminded us that in order for the supply of textbooks to be smooth, the work has to start already at the end of the previous year.
He also mentioned that printing and logistics costs are greatly affected by the significant increase in the price of raw materials and energy, but these problems “were able to be overcome”.
The manager said that the textbooks from all the publishers arrived in Kello’s warehouses on time, they started sorting the textbooks by school and arranging them on pallets last week, and the first schools will receive their textbooks on Tuesday.
The delivery lasts until August 31, in Kello’s warehouses in Anőlő and Celldömölk, in addition to its own workforce, about 700 people – mostly students – help with the work.
Zsolt Tőczik also says that from August 21, schools have the opportunity to place additional orders, which will be accepted until September 15, and delivery will begin in the second half of September.
(MTI)
Photo: MTI/Zoltán Máthé
