Civil Societies asked to join in the efforts at improving education

Mrs Naana Biney, the Director-General of the Ghana Education Service (GES), has said the obligation of improving the educational system should not rest only on central and local government departments, development partners and NGOs but on all stakeholders.

She said a society that was ignorant would become the breeding ground for violence and intolerance whilst an educated society would encourage tolerance, peace, justice and understanding.

Mrs Biney said this in an address read for her at the 2012 Education Sector Annual Review Meeting underway in Bolgatanga on the theme, “Effective school supervision, the bedrock to quality education delivery.”

Mrs Biney urged all stakeholders who would organize similar education annual reviews to focus on expansion and improving early childhood care by ensuring that by 2015, all children who faced difficult circumstances had access to Basic Education of good quality.

She said stakeholders needed to help improve all aspects of education by ensuring excellence of all, so that recognized and measurable learning outcomes were achieved especially in literacy, numeracy, ICT and essentials of life skill programmes.

Mr Paul Apanga, Regional Director of Education, said the recent downward trend in the BECE and other problems confronting the education sector could not be blamed on past colonial and post colonial policies but systems failure that had nothing to do with discriminatory government policies against the north.

He said in 2010, 34.3% of all candidates in the Upper East Region qualified for placement, and in 2011 the number slightly increased by 10%.

Mr Apanga said this was not encouraging and portrayed a system failure at the basic school level and called for all to employ strategies to rectify the situation.

Mrs Lucy Awuni, the Deputy Upper East Regional Minister, urged stakeholders to improve on their supervisory role to ensure that the country produced the needed human resource it desired.

She said the greatest supervision rested on class teachers who had to make good use of their contact hours and also be committed to duty.**