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‘Wing School’ concept makes progress

The Alliance for Change in Education (ACE) project, under which the “Wing School” concept was piloted in two districts in the Northern Region, has made remarkable progress within the seven-year period of its implementation.

With IBIS Ghana, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) as host of the project, the “Wing School” concept was piloted to target out-of-school children in hard-to-reach and underserved communities of the Gushegu and Karaga districts in the Northern Region.

Wing schools are simple structures (such as pavilions) built with community participation in deprived communities to provide education for children from kindergarten to primary three.

They are also built in communities that are far from the nearest basic schools.

The ACE project, which was funded by the Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA), was introduced in 2007 by three Danish organisations- Ghana Friendship Groups in Denmark, the Danish Teachers Union and IBIS Denmark.

Other Ghanaian counterparts and local collaborators included the district assemblies of Gushegu and Karaga,  Ghana Education Service (GES),  Bagabaga College of Education,  School for Life,  Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT),  Northern Network for Education Development (NNED), Integrated Social Development Centre (ISODEC) and local civil society groups.

The project expects that by class three, children would have grown enough to travel the distance to the fully fledged primary schools in the other communities or would be lucky to have their wing school developed into a complete primary school.

 

The success story

Addressing the gathering at a ceremony in Accra to mark the end of the project, the Country Director of IBIS Ghana, Mr Charles Wontewe, said a total of 56 wing schools had been built in the two communities over the past seven years.

He added that there had been an increase in accessing education for thousands of out-of-school children living in hard-to-reach deprived communities in the districts with over 9000 rural children been enrolled or had passed through the wing school.

He cited that between the 2007 and 2008 academic year, statistics from the GES indicated that there were only 9,163 children in school in Gushegu and 7,918 in Karaga.

However, after the implementation of interventions by the ACE, as well as other interventions such as school feeding, enrolment in the two districts increased in the last six years.

“In the 2013/2014 academic year, there are now 32,015 children enrolled in school in the Gushegu District and 20,844 in the Karaga District,” he indicated.

Furthermore, the partnership with IBIS Ghana and its funding partners has also created opportunities for many youth in the two districts, who are now engaged as teachers.

“Today, 40 of them have become professional teachers after being supported to enrol and complete the Untrained Teachers Diploma in Basic Education (UTDBE) and 160 more are in line to graduate in 2014,” he added.

Mr Wontewe said due to the success of the model, 39 of the 56 wing schools in the two districts had been adopted by the government and transformed into primary schools, while the remaining continued to function as wing schools.

Additionally, he said another significant success of the model concept was the improvement in girls’ enrolment, which had consequently improved the gender parity index and that “out of a total of over 9000 children enrolled into the wing schools, 44.9 per cent were girls.”

 

Challenges

Presenting a group’s findings on the ACE Model, a member of the Centre for Research on Improving Quality of Primary Education (CRIQPEG) of the University of Cape Coast, Mr Jonathan Arko Fletcher, said even though the model concept provided the opportunity for the pupils to be taught in their local dialect, some pupils easily developed interest in certain subjects more than the others.

He said sustainability was the greatest of all the challenges associated with the project, as the cost for running the wing school model such as translating books from English language to the local language, as well as training teachers, might be too much for the District Assemblies (DAs).

He, therefore, recommended that the ACE schools be adopted by the GES to ensure the sustainability of the project.

The Director in charge of Basic Education, Mr Stephen Adu, expressed optimism that government would work hard to sustain and improve on the gains of the project made so far and replicate the good practices from the project in other hard-to-reach communities in the country.

By Zainabu Issah & Lydia Ezit/Daily Graphic/Ghana

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