Increase investment in public schools - GNECC to government

Ghana National Education Campaign Coalition (GNECC) has called on the government to invest greatly in public schools.

This according to the Coalition is to ensure high-quality education and to make schooling more attractive.

Chairman of the coalition, Kofi Asare said, “If you look at the basic school budget, about 95 percent of the basic school budget goes into the payment of salaries, and the training of teachers, in-service training and leave allowances. So you find that investments that should go directly into a non-teaching aspect of quality is not there. If we want to see quality learning outcomes, we need to invest in education” he said.

Mr Asare said the government’s consistent denial of resources for management and supervision on public schools affects the productivity and input of teachers in the public school.

“Public education of high quality can only be achieved with adequate, timely funding. Consistently denying public schools resources for management and supervision while at the same time expecting them to produce outcomes similar to that of high-end private schools is not feasible. The government must ensure funds are released immediately,” he added.

Kofi Asare urged the government to clear capitation grants arrears in public schools for effective and efficient running of the school.

“While commending the government for increasing the capitation by more than 100% within the first two years of officers, it is unfortunate the schools have not received any grant for two academic terms”, Mr. Asare said.



The coalition is against the government’s plan of employing private persons to manage a public school asking the government to treat education as a public service and not a commodity.

Fight against Privatization

The Coalition views the government's plan to privatize low performing public schools as an attempt to commodify education using public funds.

“GNECC after participating in the initial planning phase of this Ghana Partnership Schools (GPS) project has observed that, the GPS project seeks to hand over the management of low performing public schools to private firms and the Ministry of Education in turns wants to reward these private firms based on the learning outcomes that they achieve in managing these schools. Now, the coalition views this as an attempt to commodify and privatize education using public funds.

“We are not against the project, but we are against any attempt to commodify education. Education is a public service and for that matter, we are against the practice of engaging a private person to manage a public school and agree to pay the person based on learning outcomes. In that case, the motive will be profit and we are against that” Kofi Asare explained.