NGO dialogues with district directors of education on performance

Mrs Elizabeth De-Souza, Northern Regional Director of Education has attributed the poor performance in education to poor supervision, and suggested the need for directors of education and circuit supervisors to help improve performance.

She called on the leadership of the Ghana Education Service to ensure that there is massive improvement in the performance of students as way of alleviating poverty.

Mrs De-Souza made this known in an interview with the Ghana News Agency on the sidelines of an educational review forum, held on Thursday in Tamale.

The forum, which was dubbed: “Planning to Achieve Improved Performance in Education” was organised by the Campaign for Female Education, (CAMFED) a non-governmental organisation, working towards education of the girl- child in the country.

It brought together district educational directors and girl education officers from Northern, Upper West and Central Regions to discuss, share ideas and develop efficient and effective measures to improve performance in education.

Mrs De-Souza said the region have many educational challenges such as poor reading habits among pupils which could have been checked at the lower levels of basic education.

She said reading could be used as a yardstick to promote children as was done some time ago to measure reading skills and competence.

Mrs Deloris Dickson, Executive Director of CAMFED said, her outfit had rolled out many programmes that sought to educate, protect, respect and value every girl child to grow to realise her full potential for a better future.

She said beneficiaries of the programme would be assisted with basic needs such as books, uniforms and other logistics to retain them in school and also bring other benefits to them as individuals, their families and their communities.

Mrs Dickson explained that the organisation had other female initiatives aimed at increasing women’s control over resources to commensurate with the National Strategy for Financial Literacy, a programme being implemented by the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning.

Mr Justin Darkorah, Bunkpurugu-Yunyoo District Director of Education indicated that the district is facing numerous challenges with most parents in the District preferring to train their children to take up farming rather than sending them to school.

He noted that the habit of parents withdrawing their children from school for farming activities or for other reasons is crippling the District’s quest of enrolling all children of school going age under the free, compulsory basic education programme.

Mr Dakorah said, the directorate in collaboration with other stakeholders had resolved to resort to the old system of visiting pupils in their homes to ascertain why they did not show up in school.

“Some of our measures to improve education includes embarking on a vigorous enrollment drive and retention of children in schools, sensitisation of all stakeholders especially parents and chiefs to realize the importance of education and making teaching and learning attractive,” he said.

Mr Darkorah stressed that due to poverty, many of the indigenes did not aspire for higher educational laurels, while others frequently migrated to the South in search of non existing jobs.

Some of the innovations suggested to help improve education included night extra classes, rotating circuit supervisors, strengthening of school management and oversight committees.

Other measures include encouraging pupils, especially female children to set targets to guide them, mentoring and modeling, instituting bye-laws to ban school children from attending funerals and imposing sanctions on teachers who regularly absent themselves from school.**