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An empty school compound with locked classrooms during a visit to the Nima Cluster of schools at Nima in Accra. Picture: EDNA SALVO-KOTEY
An empty school compound with locked classrooms during a visit to the Nima Cluster of schools at Nima in Accra. Picture: EDNA SALVO-KOTEY

Let’s get academic calendar out

A stable academic calendar for the smooth running of the educational sector is crucial for many reasons.

The timely availability of such a calendar enables the management of education to plan well and be in a position to execute the needed transformational agenda of the President.

It also enables managers of the various schools to plan and project how they will manage or run their respective schools.

Unfortunately, this seems not to be the case in the recent past, resulting in the inability of managers of pre-tertiary schools to tell when a term or semester begins or ends.

This has led to instances when students are unable to write their end-of-semester examinations because the closing date suddenly comes up and the schools are unable to conduct the examinations.

The Daily Graphic is happy that there is an effort to produce an academic calendar that will not only take care of the 2022 academic year but also look at 2023 and 2024 to avoid some of the infractions that bedeviled the calendar during the 2021 academic year.

We are, however, wondering why the development of an academic calendar, which has been done over the years seamlessly, now has to take the Minister of Education to form a Ministerial Committee under the leadership of his Deputy Minister in charge of General Education.

We understand this is for clarity and consistency in the effective management of our schools at the pre-tertiary level.

The committee, we further understand, has representatives from the various sectors of the ministry, including the GES, the Free SHS Secretariat, the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NACCA), the TVET Service, heads of schools, among others.

Nonetheless, our concern is whether or not we really need a ministerial committee to develop a comprehensive academic calendar.

This view point is shared by the leadership of the Shakers and Movers of Educational (SAME) Foundation, who also argue that there is no need to set up a committee to come up with an academic calendar.

We cannot help but agree with the non-governmental organisation (NGO) SAME that drawing up an academic calendar should not require a ministerial committee when there is, indeed, the School and Instruction Directorate (a merger of the former Secondary and Basic divisions) of the GES, with competent people to do such a job.

In our view, we are reinventing the wheel when, indeed, there is already a directorate in place.

We need more explanation as to why such a committee is in place. Could it be because the GES Council, which should have been in place to free the ministry to focus on policy formulation, is yet to be reconstituted, almost a year down the lane?

We acknowledge the explanation that the ministerial committee became necessary with the addition of more TVET schools which will benefit from the free SHS policy and there is, therefore, the need for the Ministry of Education to reconcile and have a workable calendar that takes into consideration all those TVET schools.

The academic calendar, we learnt, will look beyond 2022 to 2023 and 2024 to see how we can gradually come back to the school calendar year, which ends in June/July and starts in September/October.

Even though all these are satisfactory reasons, we still think that setting up a ministerial committee for such a basic exercise is rather delaying the process because our conviction is that by now the academic calendar should be out; why that is not the case is most worrying.

Fortunately, we learn that the committee is almost done with its work and a draft report is being perused by the heads of schools and other stakeholders for their input.

This process must be fast-tracked to enable the final academic calendar to be adopted for implementation. Our children cannot sit at home any longer.

For us, if there is anything worth acknowledging, it is the aspect of gradually working towards a come back to the original school calendar year, which ends in June/July and starts in September/October.

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