FG Cuts Textbook Assessment Fees By 25% Amid Publisher Pushback
Publishers and authors preparing to enter Nigeria’s new textbook evaluation regime have been handed a measure of relief, after the Nigerian Educational Research and Development Council reduced the cost of assessing and ranking school textbooks and ordered refunds for firms that already paid the higher rates. The decision, announced in a statement signed by the Council’s Executive Secretary, Prof. Salisu Shehu, and released on Wednesday in Abuja, takes immediate effect and is designed to ease the financial pressure on stakeholders ahead of the rollout of the Federal Government’s National Textbook Ranking System.
Under the revised structure, the assessment fee falls from 2,000 naira to 1,500 naira per page, a reduction of 25 percent, while the ranking fee for each textbook title drops from 1 million naira to 750,000 naira. According to the statement, publishers who had already paid the former assessment fee of 2,000 naira per page will receive refunds of the excess, though the Council said the procedure for processing those refunds would be announced soon. “Publishers who had already paid the previous assessment fee of N2,000 per page will receive refunds of the excess payment, while the procedure for processing the refunds will be announced soon,” the statement said, adding that fresh submissions must now be made at the revised rates.
The concession lands at a delicate moment for the reform. From September 2026, only textbooks that have been assessed, approved and ranked by NERDC will be permitted in Nigerian classrooms, and any title that fails to pass through the process will no longer be allowed on school shelves. The policy, introduced by the Minister of Education, Dr Tunji Alausa, forms part of the wider education agenda pursued by the Federal Ministry of Education under the Renewed Hope programme, and represents one of the most consequential shifts in the country’s textbook governance in years.
Alausa has framed the ranking system as a direct response to the flood of low quality instructional materials in circulation. When the initiative was unveiled, he explained that it was designed to tackle the proliferation of substandard textbooks and to guarantee that learners and teachers have access only to high quality, curriculum compliant materials. He stressed that NERDC would retain its statutory duty of approving textbooks, but that approval alone would no longer be enough, since every approved title would face a rigorous national evaluation and ranking by expert committees before it could be recommended for use.
That marks a departure from the old model. Where the previous system delivered a straightforward verdict of approved or rejected, the 2026 framework scores each title across multiple quality benchmarks and assigns a competitive ranking within the statutory approval process. The Council has also directed that all textbooks, including those that previously scaled internal assessment and already hold approval licences, be resubmitted for fresh profiling under the new national standards. To manage the volume, NERDC segmented the exercise into phases. The first phase, which the Council flagged off earlier in the year, targeted core textbooks for key transition classes, namely Primary 1, Primary 4, Junior Secondary School 1 and Senior Secondary School 1, with registration opening on June 8 and closing on June 19, 2026, and evaluation slated for completion by July 31, 2026. Later phases are expected to cover the remaining class levels.
The reform is unfolding against a backdrop of deep learning challenges that lend it urgency. Alausa disclosed at a Federal Ministry of Education and Universal Basic Education Commission roundtable in Abuja that Nigeria’s learning poverty rate stands at 75 percent, meaning roughly 42 million children at the basic level are unable to read and understand an age appropriate text by the age of 10. Put differently, three out of every four Nigerian children fall into that category. Data from UBEC has separately shown that fewer than 30 percent of pupils in public primary schools reach grade level proficiency in literacy and numeracy, a gap that officials and the World Bank have linked in part to weak teacher training and deployment.
The scale of the access problem compounds the quality concern. Government figures put the number of out-of-school children at about 15 million, though the United Nations Children’s Fund estimated 18.3 million in its 2024 assessment, comprising 10.2 million of primary school age and 8.1 million of secondary school age, and some education experts have cited figures as high as 18.5 million. Save the Children, marking the 2026 International Day of Education, warned that more than 28 million Nigerian children and adolescents lack access to formal schooling or digital learning. Quality instructional materials sit at the centre of any attempt to reverse these numbers, which is the case the ministry has advanced for tightening textbook standards.
The government has pointed to parallel investments to argue that the ranking policy is not an isolated measure. Alausa said that between January 2025 and January 2026, states accessed more than 106 billion naira in UBEC matching grants, while 22 billion naira went into teacher professional development, resulting in the training of about 978,000 teachers. He added that more than 10,000 classrooms had been renovated and 7.8 million textbooks distributed to improve learning conditions. The ministry has also revived abandoned Unity College e-libraries, expanded digital learning platforms such as the Nigeria Learning Passport and the Greenfield Learning Management System, and rolled out nationwide learning assessments alongside a Learner Identification Number to track pupils in real time.
The policy has not gone unchallenged. The Nigerian Publishers Association rejected the ranking framework on April 28, 2026 and called for its immediate withdrawal, arguing that its position rested on clear and verifiable concerns about the implications for education, competition, publishing and constitutional governance. The Association has also complained that NERDC proceeded to implementation without concluding its engagement with publishers and other stakeholders, and industry voices have questioned both the ranking of educational textbooks and the fees attached to the exercise. Wednesday’s downward review of charges appears, at least in part, to be a response to that pushback, even as the underlying disagreement over the ranking model itself remains unresolved.
The fee cut also speaks to a broader national debate over the cost of education and the use of assessment charges as revenue. The controversy over examination fees, including the suspension of a proposed NECO fee increase that state officials in Kano publicly welcomed, has sharpened public sensitivity to any policy that adds to the financial load carried by schools, families and publishers. By lowering the assessment and ranking fees while insisting on compliance, NERDC is attempting to preserve the reform’s core requirement without deepening that burden.
For now, the immediate questions are practical. Publishers await the promised details of how refunds will be processed, while the wider industry weighs whether the reduced fees and phased timeline are enough to secure broad participation before the September deadline. What is settled is the direction of travel. From the start of the coming academic session, a textbook’s place in a Nigerian classroom will depend not only on approval, but on where it lands in a national ranking, a standard the government insists is necessary to lift learning outcomes and one that a significant part of the publishing sector continues to contest.