Ensure better outcomes from public schools - Prof. Adei

Professor Stephen Adei, Former Rector of Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA) has called on stakeholders to urgently work together to ensure a better outcome from public basic schools.

He said such outcome would be achieved through effective decentralisation of the Ghana Education Service (GES), as well as putting school management and communities in charge of education, and bringing quality assurance closer at the district level.


“Public schools have a lot to learn from the private sector with regard to management, supervision, discipline and delivering quality educational outcomes…The power of the private sector is that it tends to be innovative and creative and set the pace.


“The role of the private sector must be acknowledged as an important partner in our education system," Prof Adei said during the launch of the Easy School find project in Accra.


Easy School find project is the latest innovation of the Digital Education Group (DEG), the parent Company of etoys&more.


It is designed to give parents the chance to access schools of their choice and also to offer schools the platform to promote their brand by logging on to www.easyschoolfind.com.

Access to the platform would be free for all parents and students. School authorities would however have to pay for advertising their schools for a reasonable fee.


Prof. Adei said a major factor that could help improve public schools' outcome is the deployment of ICT where it ensures that schools have access to power, preferably solar, and teachers and students trained to become computer literate and to make ICT the centrepiece of learning.


“This would be opening kids to a brave new world of global knowledge from anywhere in the country.”


He said both the public and private schools should move totally to ICT facilitated, students-centred learning and opening “our kids to the brave new world of global education. In other words, the time has come to use ICT to deliver content-making traditional books and library less relevant."


Prof. Adei, therefore, commended DEG for the easyschoolfind project, which he described as self-serving, offering a good option to schools in terms of advertisement.

Mr. George Sackey Jr, Chief Executive Officer of DEG said easyschoolfind has been carefully designed out of a good feedback and rigorous development and testing processes to satisfy parents, schools and other educational stakeholders.


“Today we are delighted to offer a unique products, the first of its kind in Ghana and the entire West African sub-region that offers parents their choicest schools in a simplified and most convenient manner, whilst at the same time effectively marketing our schools and making them visible and accessible globally, and ultimately improving the overall educational standard in our country," Mr Sackey noted.


Ms. Priscilla Adom Tawiah, Brands Manger, Easyfschoolfind, said the search engine would provide easy, convenient, effective and useful electronic school search for parents, guardians, educators and students.


“We were certain that Ghana needed such a technological platform to relieve parents and students of the stress associated with school search and ultimately to improve the standard of education in our dear nation,” she said.