Heads to be held accountable for students poor performance

Professor Jane Naana Opoku-Agyemang, the Education Minister, has warned to hold accountable heads of schools over consistent low grades scored by students in science and mathematics in the West African Senior School Examination (WASSCE).

“We wonder why a head of a public or private institution, that superintends over failure rate of 90 per cent and above is allowed to continue operations without accounting to the Ghana Education Service (GES) and the public.”

She stated that the ministry would not tolerate any longer such headmasters and headmistresses.

She was addressing a meeting held with heads of public and private senior high schools (SHS) across the nation to discuss strategies to raise performance in this year’s WASSCE.

Mr. Jacob Aaworb-NangMaabobr Kor, Director General of the GES, attended the meeting, which brought together about 500 school heads, regional directors and directors at the ministry.

The Minister said over the past three years it had invested significant proportion of its budgetary allocation to expand access and improve the quality of secondary education.

The focus now was to make sure that there was radical improvement of students’ performance in the WASSCE, especially in the two core subjects - mathematics and science where historically they had not been doing well.

Prof Naana Opoku-Agyemang noted that the abysmal performance of the private SHS had been a major contributory factor to the unimpressive national performance.

She therefore asked owners of the private schools to do the right thing by engaging qualified teachers.

She said her expectation was that the heads through their discussions would devise appropriate strategies to adequately prepare their students for 2016 WASSCE.