Complementary Education chalks up successes in Volta Region
The Executive Director for Complementary Education Agency under the Ministry of Education, Francis Asumadu, has said that complementary education in the Volta Region has chalked up tremendous successes, leading to the rise in complementary basic education and occupational skills.
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He said the successes had been as a result of the strong transitional road map of Complementary Education (CE), as part of its transition to operationalise the Act.
He was speaking at the just ended Stakeholders Validation workshop on Complementary Education Agency Legislative Instrument (LI), Complementary Education (CE) Policy and Resource Mobilisation Strategy (RMS) in Ho, which was supported by the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office of the United Kingdom (FCDO).
Three workshops have been held in the northern and southern sectors, as well as the National level with consultations on the need to address stakeholders’ views and objectives, as well as validating their ideas and expertise from the workshops.
The Legislative Instrument seeks to build a strong transitional road map, and to shift operations to the Complementary Education Agency (CEA) for delivery.
Complementary Education
Mr Asumadu stated that giant steps had been taken to ensure that the complementary education agency became a third force in education delivery in Ghana.
He said the Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) Service had come on board strongly to ensure that skills development and other pathways were incorporated into Ghana's education.
He also said that the non-formal and informal education subsector was needed to move along with the education transformation for comprehensive education, to ensure that education became the right of people.
"We are providing for all the spaces that are within education provision.
The objective of complimentary education is to ensure that out of school learning is well structured and people are integrated into formal education, and can learn from the basic level, intermediate level through to advanced level and to the university.
So with the lifelong learning framework, CEA is making it a comprehensive one for everybody in education delivery," he stated.
He stressed though that there had been difficulties in getting ideas together to have a formidable legislative instrument and a policy to run as an agency.
He explained that in complementary education, there were a lot of Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) and implementing partners who are not within the public sector hence, the need to bring all of them together to have a focus and a direction.
Meanwhile, the Volta Regional Minister, Dr Archibald Yao Letsa, has stated that the government is committed to ensuring access to education in all forms, hence the passage of the Complementary Education Agency Act 2020, Act 1055.
He noted that the 2022 Budget captured CEA, adding that the Finance Minister had stated that the Complementary Education Agency Act 2020, would be operationalised in 2023. He said as part of the operationalisation, series of workshops had been organised.
He called on all to contribute their quota to make complementary education a success and gave an assurance of the readiness of the Coordinating Council to partner and offer assistance to the CEA in the region.
Team Leader for the FCDO Complementary Education Technical Assistance Team, Dr Adam Baisie Ghartey, called on CEA to leverage on occupational skills and competency-based training, adult functional literacy, complementary basic education and remedial education, to enhance the outlook of complementary education.
He said in the development of curriculum, programmes and implementation, a standard curriculum development which is a key criterion for curriculum content, teaching and learning approaches ought to be adhered to.
He also called for the establishment of learning centres across the country, coupled with community engagements, as it would ensure accessibility to out-of-school children, youth and adult learning.