The Progressive People’s Party (PPP) has called on the government to consider re-instituting the teachers’ allowance to motivate teachers to deliver the quality education needed by the country.
He attributed Ghana’s inability to achieve its educational goals to low morale and low commitment among teachers, inadequate infrastructure and basic tools in schools and the high and increasing cost of tertiary education.
A lecturer of the Ashesi University, Mr Fredrick Anyan, who is also a member of the Communications Team of the PPP, made the call at a press conference in Accra yesterday.
The press conference was to outline the party’s policy on education as part of activities marking the PPP’s second anniversary.
Mr Anyan said the removal of the allowance and the unavailability of resources allocated to the educational sector had contributed to the failure of teachers and children to perform perfectly in various schools in the country.
He spoke on the theme, “No Child Left Behind at Home”.
School placement system
Commenting on the school placement system in the country, he said in 2013, out of the 392,000 candidates presented for the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE), only 210,000, representing 53.5 per cent, passed, adding that some schools even had zero success.
Mr Anyan said the West African Secondary School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) results for 2013 were so poor that tertiary institutions, especially the polytechnics, had to lower intake criteria to allow poor performing students the opportunity to be admitted.
He argued that the Ghanaian educational system also lacked the needed quality and monitoring from the Ministry of Education and the Ghana Education Service (GES) to bring up quality trainers from the colleges of education.
Mr Anyan said even though the government had made certain amendments to the 2014 budget to solve the problems of schools under trees, “we are still faced with 1,286 schools under trees to be eliminated from the country”.
He, therefore, advised the public to be aggressive and decisive if they wanted to secure and invest in the future of their children.
PPP agenda on education
He said the PPP was ready to transform the educational sector through the provision of attractive incentives to motivate teachers to deliver quality education to the people.
He said the PPP had also made education one of its top priorities to transform individuals who would be able to deliver results and manage the affairs of the state.
He said the success of education in other countries, including America and Canada stemmed from the fact that most of these countries never entrusted education into the hands of private owners.
Mr Anyan said that was the reverse in our country, adding that quality education could only be obtained in the top private schools, leaving government schools for the less privileged.
He said even though the government had made certain contributions to ease the problems facing the educational sector, the UNDP 2010 report indicated that those contributions did not translate into quality tuition and learning in the sector.
Mr Anyan said a future PPP government would provide quality education for every Ghanaian child, with standard school facilities such as libraries and ICT labs from the kindergarten to senior high school to facilitate teaching and learning in schools.
He said the party would also deploy an educational police to enforce the compulsory aspect of the Free Compulsory Universal Basic Education (FCUBE) and ensure increasing vocational training to enable students to gain employable skills before leaving school.
