The Education Ministry denies all blame for the chronic lack of textbooks – about a third of all textbooks that should have been distributed to elementary school students have not been printed on time.

According to the Ministry, the long standing problem is actually the fault of the authors of the textbooks, who they say were slow to submit texts, causing delays in their approval process.

The Ministry has no legal authority to influence the submissions of new texts and every failed bid for a textbook causes new delays, the Ministry said.