Investments in education yielding results — President
President John Dramani Mahama yesterday said the heavy investment in education in the country yielding results and reflecting in the performance of students.
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“Performances at both the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) and the West African Secondary School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) have seen remarkable improvement.
“The very last batch of BECE students recorded the highest number of students obtaining a raw score of above 500 marks in the history of the examination,” President Mahama said in his last State of the Nation’s Address to Parliament.
Significant improvement
He said the country was witnessing a significant improvement in the educational outcomes as more children, than ever before in history, were having access to education at the basic and secondary levels.
President Mahama said as part of interventions to improve education, free text books had been distributed to schoolchildren, adding that “Children now have access to all the four textbooks and no longer have to share.”
He recounted that in excess of 2,000 dilapidated schools, popularly, referred to as “schools under trees,” had been replaced, while teachers were more available and were more evenly distributed than in the past.
On teacher absenteeism, President Mahama said the practice had been reduced from 27 per cent to below nine per cent, adding that it had led to more engagement hours between teachers and students.
More infrastructure
President Mahama said the construction of 47 community day senior high schools meant more students were able to continue their education beyond the basic level instead of dropping out.
He announced that the progressively free secondary education programme, where the major fees paid by day students were absorbed, had been extended to cover 140,000 boarding students.”
Touching on the infrastructure at the tertiary education level, he said the construction of additional public universities in the Brong Ahafo and Volta regions had improved access to university education.
“The sod cutting for the start of work on the University of Environment and Sustainable Development in the Eastern Region, the conversion of the polytechnics into technical universities, the creation of three autonomous universities out of the University for Development Studies (UDS) are all creating additional opportunities for students to pursue courses at the tertiary level,” President Mahama told Parliament.
Challenges
President Mahama recalled that before the start of his term in office, and for many years prior, there had been national dissatisfaction at the declining standards of education at the basic and secondary levels, adding that “lack of access to both basic and secondary education meant that many children were being left behind”.
He itemised the challenges the country faced to include the shortage of professionally trained teachers, teacher absenteeism, shortage of core textbooks- resulting in a situation in which four children shared one textbook-, dilapidated schools, lack of science laboratories and workshops, among others.
President Mahama said all those manifested in declining results at the BECE and WASSCE, adding that the vision under his administration, therefore, had been to turn that situation round and not only improve access to education but also the quality of education.