THE GQAA DIRECTOR – DR VIOLET MAKUKU ATTENDS THE GHANA POLICY DIALOGUE STREAMED LIVE ON TV3 IN ACCRA, GHANA

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The Director for the Global Quality Assurance Association (GQAA) – Dr Violet Makuku’s day (4th April 2024) started with a very important event that was meant to shape the Ghana Education system for socio-economic development and transformation. This was a Policy Dialogue entitled – TOWARDS TRANSFORMATIVE BASIC EDUCATION OUTCOMES: PROGRESS, PROBLEMS & PROSPECTS at the TV3 Premises’ Executive Theatre in Accra, Ghana. Thank you to the organizers for giving us a good 3 hours to just focus on this subject. Ghana and other countries can learn a lot from the frank discussions and submissions.

One thing that shows how serious the Ghana government is about education issues is its preparedness to come in the open on TV3, Facebook and as many as 7 radio channels across the country and air an unedited dialogue of such a nature. Secondly, the topic of discussion gave room for everything to be deliberated on openly. This included what is going well and not going well in the basic education system in a quest to improve the implementation and impact of the Ghana Basic Education.

It was realized that there is a high weak link between the primary and secondary education. The rural-urban divide continues to widen and along the lines from kindergarten to junior secondary school the dropout rate is much more in rural areas as opposed to urban settings. This is mainly because learners travel more than the recommended 3km to school and in some cases, they walk for up to 5-10km to school. This is highly prohibitive and discouraging. There is therefore, a great need to i) construct more primary schools, especially in the rural areas, ii) renovate the existing schools and provide appropriate infrastructure in the rural settings because there are learners who are still schooling under trees. This is something that still needs to be resolved and the challenge existed earlier before the current government came in. This government introduced the double track system in order to increase access to education but there are issues which need to be looked into and resolved for it to yield better results.

Digitalization was suggested as a way to improve access but there is need to extend infrastructure to the rural areas for this to work and include the economically disadvantaged learners in these settings. Electricity, Internet services and good roads are needed in those areas for digitalization to work for both the urban and rural scholars. It was agreed that the proposed government model of constructing new schools where all primary school learners will be housed was not feasible considering the fact that there will be buses to pick the learners. This would be a challenge because rural roads are in a bad state and maintenance of the current fleet of school buses has been a challenge. Such a straight jacket approach was unacceptable especially without feasibility studies and data to inform the contextual circumstances. The model may work in some locations but not in others due to infrastructural, logistics and other issues.

Another major cause of concern is that the urban schools are overpopulated in terms of teacher supply while the rural areas are underpopulated. This is to the extend that in 2023 there was a rural school with 4 teachers for kindergarten to grade 6 but in 2024, only one lady was left to teach all those classes alone. The proposed solutions included i) a 20% extra salary for rural teachers, ii) prevention of any movement of teachers to urban schools once they are deployed and giving back the deployment task to the District Directors who were earlier accused of corruption during teacher deployment. They were then removed from the deployment process but now measures could be put in place to check their malpractices and punish them according. Monitoring and evaluation would work.

However, one good thing is that the Ghana government introduced degree programmes for primary school teachers so that they become more competent with the 21st Century skills that they should impart to the learners.
It was noted that excellent policies were in place, but the major challenge has been the implementation aspect. One example was the Ghana Standard-Based Curriculum (SBC) which was meant to assist in giving feedback on learners and teachers’ strengths, gaps and challenges as well as other operational issues. This was meant to be administered at different school levels from basic class 2, 4 and 6. A delay in the release of the collected feedback to the schools for practitioners to act appropriately was noted and this works against the main purpose of introducing the SBC. To date (April 2024), 64% of the textbooks were distributed and private schools started with the textbooks from the onset 6 years ago. Therefore, there are disadvantaged schools. The Ghana government introduced the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NaCCA) as the national authority responsible for the monitoring and evaluation of curriculum matters.

There was a call to encourage the culture of reading to learners and lifelong learning for teachers because some of the skills require individuals to initiate the acquisition. There is a greater need to separate and disentangle politics from academic matters in order to objectively and frankly address all education related issues for socio-economic development.
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