Senator Sherwin Gatchalian on Wednesday said he will propose amendments to Republic Act No. 8047, or the Book Publishing Industry Development Act, to streamline the textbook procurement process to ensure that every basic education learner has a complete set of textbooks.

“My suggestion is to liberalize the procurement of textbooks so that we will not be burdened by logistics and the bidding process because that takes time, and this is connected to learner performance. If only our Grade 5 and 6 learners have complete textbooks, we cannot expect so much from our learners to perform well because the basic learning material is non-existent,” he said in a news release.

To ensure a one-is-to-one student-textbook ratio, Gatchalian’s office estimated that around PHP28 billion, or around 4 percent of the Department of Education’s (DepEd) more than PHP700 billion allocation, is needed.

“We must solve the process. I’m very optimistic, I can lobby to allocate PHP28 billion a year to procure textbooks. But even though we allocate PHP28 billion a year, if it will take you three years to spend it, sayang lang (it’s only a waste),” the chair of the Senate Committee on Basic Education said.

Gatchalian’s panel earlier discovered issues hounding textbook procurement, which include insufficient development time, high participation costs, prolonged review processes, and pricing issues.

These issues, he said, make the process take an average of three years, while textbook procurement should only take 180 days.

He cited the example of Japan’s Textbook Authorization Research Council, which accredits textbook titles and ensures compliance with standards, which he said can be looked into by the DepEd if it can be applied in the Philippine setting.

The list of accredited titles guide Japan’s schools and students when it comes to securing textbooks, sparing them from procurement, manuscript development, and delivery bottlenecks. (PNA)