Professor Kwasi Opoku-Amankwa, the Director-General of the Ghana Education Service (GES), has advised staff to use due process and not demonstrations and petitions to exit from the GES-SIC Life Insurance Policy.
He said members who were not interested in the policy, which was to cater for staff, could pick forms from any GES/SIC offices or go online to fill the forms to get their names deleted from the system and for the monies to be refunded to them.
Prof Opoku-Amankwa was addressing a press conference on the GES-SIC Life Policy controversies, training programme to introduce its new curriculum and the re-opening for Senior High School Three (SHS 3) held in Accra on Thursday.
On August 6, this year, a letter was written to the Controller and Accountant General’s Department to suspend the monthly deductions of GH¢10.00 for the second time to enable the institution educate its members on the need to get on board as suggested by some.
The Director-General said members were given one month to opt-out, else, they would be considered contributors when the deductions resume in September.
So far, 40,000 staff out of the 340,000 had picked forms to that effect, adding that 34,000 had had their monies refunded but 45 still had their names in the system due to some discrepancies with their information.
He said about 900 names would be published in the newspapers and directed on how to get their names deleted from the system.
The Director-General noted that getting on board the policy was not a union’s decision but individuals’ and encouraged the staff to subscribe to it as it was worth it.
Professor Opoku-Amankwa explained that government’s effort to make education the centre of all its programmes saw the need to cater for the welfare of its stakeholders, including teachers, thus, it engaged GES and came up with the policy in June 2018.
He said though GES had its own welfare, the benefit was nothing to write home about and it also took close to year to make claims, which paid at most GH¢1,500.00 meant for a coffin of a bereaved member, thus, the need for the insurance policy.
Sometimes staff had to contribute to sort out their colleagues, citing that one of their directors who travelled to the Volta region recently and got involved in an accident and had spent over GH¢2,000.00 was only given GH¢200.00 as members’ contribution, he added.
He said GH¢126,000.00 was paid to seven beneficiaries or their families though they had made few contributions before they experienced permanent disability, critical illness or death.
On the re-opening, he said the Basic School would re-open on September 10 whilst Form three Senior High School students would go on August 19.
With the new curriculum, he said there would be a shift from objective-based to standard-based curriculum to help strengthen students’ reading, writing, arithmetic and creativity.
He said the launch of the curriculum would afford publishers to start developing appropriate textbooks, which would be accessed, approved and recommended by the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NaCCA).
Giving the training plan under the new curriculum, Professor Opoku-Amankwa said 152,000 teachers would be needed at the cost of GH¢26 million, therefore, 36 national simulators, 186,000 master trainers and 3,900 district and regional trainers had been trained so far.
He said 152,000 Kindergarten one to Primary six teachers were undergoing training at 996 cluster centres across the districts and regions in the country.
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