NAGRAT inaugurates head office in Accra
A seven-storey national head office building for the National Association of Graduate Teachers (NAGRAT) has been inaugurated in Accra. Work on the office complex, with 37 office cubicles, three conference rooms, a library and a basement car park, among other facilities, took two and half years to complete.
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The head office, which is known as the NAGRAT Lyceum, has a large symbolic sculptural pen on the eastern side, which is to serve as a reminder of the symbolic tool of the teaching profession.
Lyceum
At the ceremony to officially open the facility, the President of NAGRAT, Mr Christian Addai-Poku, said the association decided to name the facility NAGRAT Lyceum after an edifice of antiquity named after the Greek god Appollo, which was connected with philosophical teaching and discourse.
The ancient edifice, he said, also served as a venue for military exercises and meetings of Athenian assembly, adding that “we adopted the name for our building to signify its relevance to knowledge and service.”
Mr Addai-Poku said the NAGRAT Lyceum would serve as a venue for discussing and scrutinising educational issues and policies by the academia and philosophers.
“From this building we will dialogue to get the best for the teaching profession and provide welfare services to enhance the wellbeing of teachers,” he said.
Collaboration
The NAGRAT President assured the government of the association’s readiness to collaborate with it to deliver quality education to all who qualified to access it.
After commending government for its boldness to implement free secondary education from September 2017, Mr Addai-Poku cautioned that the success or failure of the policy would depend on proper and timeous funding, training of teachers, planning and constant consultation with the relevant stakeholders.
He stated that the association was ready to dialogue with the government to formulate appropriate motivational strategies to enable teachers (who President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo had described as the centre of his educational policies) to give their best.
An official of NAGRAT conducting the dignitaries round facilities in the building. Among them are Mr Mathew Opoku Prempeh, Mr Bright Wereko-Brobby and Mr Christian Addai-Poku. Picture: EBOW HANSON
Concern
In a key note address, the Minister of Education, Mr Matthew Opoku Prempeh, acknowledged that NAGRAT was a major stakeholder in the educational sector and commended members for putting up a befitting head office.
He expressed worry about a recent situation where 800 teachers applied to the Ghana Education Service to change their dates of birth and stated that “my investigation shows that most of such people are of higher ranks in the teaching profession who do not want to retire for others to fill their positions.”
Mr Opoku Prempeh urged NAGRAT to ensure that the practice was discontinued.
A recent publication in the media said the GES had put a temporary hold on all applications for change of dates of birth, while it conducted its investigations.
On the free SHS policy of the government, the Minister of Education said there were plans to ensure that graduates of public basic schools were not deprived of getting access to public SHS.
He also urged educational circuit heads not to sabotage young teachers when they were due for promotion by delaying the clearance processes.
