Lower primary children should stay home to make room for others - Kofi Asare

An education expert, Kofi Asare, has re-echoed calls for the government to let children below the lower primary level to go home, to create extra room for students of the upper classes.

The Executive Director of the Africa Education Watch has said that this might be the most reasonable option especially for the fact that teachers are resisting attempts to implement the shift system.

Meanwhile, Kofi Asare claims that there are schools in many urban areas that have students still sitting in numbers over 70 per class, even when the Ghana Education Service has proposed that they keep numbers to only 30.

“We have an average class size of about 70 in schools in greater Accra and in many peri urban and urban schools across the country. And we have a situation where teachers are resisting attempts to introduce shift systems in these schools because when these attempts are made, they will have to work morning and afternoon without any extra remunerations,” he said.

This, he said to GhanaWeb, will be presently difficult for most teachers because they have not received any concrete assurances or otherwise on whether they will be paid for working morning and afternoon shifts when that arrangement is implemented.

He also stated that with the delay in the supply of Personal Protective Equipment to public basic schools especially, it becomes reasonable that to decongest the classes, children below the lower primary are asked to stay at home.

“There is a condition for the proposal for Kindergarten and lower primary students to go home on the basis that there is no consensus on whether teachers will get extra remuneration or not to do the shift, so they are adamant. So you’ll expect that if there is no such consensus and teachers still need to stay in school to teach, then the children from the lower primary should go home to create room for the other ones,” he said.