Constant changes in policies affect education

Wa, May 19, GNA - Madam Helena Awurusa, National Gender Coordinator of Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT), said constant changes in national educational policies had adversely affected the country's education.

She said "Frequent changes of Ministers of Education and frequent changes in the school curriculum without a corresponding in-service training for teachers and the provision of the necessary logistics are a hindrance to the provision of quality education in the country". Madam Awurusa who was speaking at a sensitization workshop for female teachers in Wa on Monday, called for quality education that was universal in scope.

The Gender Coordinator, who is also a Coordinator of the "Education for All and AIDS (EFAIDS) Project" of GNAT, said quality education should be sustainable and be able to turn out "never ending stream of trained personnel for all sectors of national life". Madam Awurusa suggested that every newly trained teacher from the College of Education should be made to start teaching for two years in a deprived community as a measure to help reduce the over staffing of teachers in urban areas. She said "There is a high concentration of qualified teachers in urban areas and to solve that problem, up to 40 per cent of salaries of teachers serving in deprived areas should be paid to them as additional incentives".

Madam Awurusa said to attract and retain qualified teachers, personal emolument of teachers should be made attractive while performance related benefits be introduced to promote competitiveness within the teaching sector. She called for provision of managerial training for managers in the Ghana Education Service while the functions and duties of Unit Managers were clearly defined to bring sanity and job satisfaction to the sector.

Madam Awurusa said the release of annual budgets for the sector must be timely and efficient implementation procedures must initiated to ensure judicious utilisation of funds for the Capitation Grant and the School Feeding Programmes (SFP). She called on government to expand the SFP to cover all schools in poor communities and to increases the grant to reflect current economic trends. Madam Awurusa expressed worry that the SFP favoured only some schools and that had led to a drift of children from schools without the programme, bloating the enrolment in school enjoying the intervention. On the Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETFund), Madam Awurusa said its functions should be streamlined to solve the problems of teachers and students. "For example, schools should be given more equipment and materials for effective teaching, and less endowed schools be directly catered for by the fund", she said. The teachers were taken through documents on the GNAT policy recommendations for achieving "Education for All", "Gender policy of 19 May 09