GNECC calls for efficiency in public basic education system
The Ghana National Education Campaign Coalition (GNECC) has called for efficiency in the public basic education system to address the inequalities in access to quality basic education.
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It observed that the poor quality of public basic education in the country had dampened the confidence of the public in that system, leading to poor patronage.
“More disturbing are the deepening inequalities in access to quality basic education the current situation is creating.”
“Those who can afford it patronise private institutions while the poorest and marginalised majority are limited to make do with the largely inefficient public school system,” the Co-ordinator of GNECC, Mr Leslie Tetteh, observed at a media briefing on the privatisation of education in the country and its impact on the right to education.
Purpose
The media briefing was in response to a request from the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) to Ghana, to respond to a list of questions on the right to education and education privatisation in Ghana by March 24, 2015.
The CRC has requested the Government of Ghana to, among others, “provide detailed information on the reasons behind the increase in private education and the low quality of public education, including lack of teachers and teacher absenteeism in the state-owned schools, limiting access to quality education for children who cannot afford private school tuition.”
The government is also tasked to provide data, disaggregated by age, sex, socio-economic background, ethnic origin for the past three years on the enrolment and completion rates, disaggregated by sex and percentage of the relevant age groups in pre-primary, primary and secondary schools. The government is also requested to provide the number and percentage of dropouts and repetitions and the number of children attending private schools.
Private school segregation
Mr Tetteh, therefore, called on the government to attach utmost importance to the request of CRC and appropriately address the questions raised.
“The coalition and its partners also wish to reiterate their key observations and concerns on education privatisation in Ghana as submitted in their parallel report and to call on the government to take immediate steps to address these concerns,” he stressed.
He said the Education Sector Performance Report showed that, currently about 29 per cent of all primary schools in the country were privately-owned, adding that recent studies had shown an additional recent trend of low income earners and the poor, also beginning to patronise private schools.
Mr Tetteh said it was estimated that there were over 7000 private basic schools in the country, which together have more than 500,000 pupils.
“GNECC and its partners are also calling on the government to review its policy on privatisation in the education sector to ensure that quality public education for all is not compromised or the poor are not discriminated against by ensuring that available resources are efficiently used to promote equity in access to quality basic education,” he added.
The coalition and its partners, he said, were also calling on the government to ensure that private schools only supplement, rather than supplant the public education system.
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