Accra, Nov. 8, GNA – The New Patriotic Party will in the next four years consolidate the implementation of the Free Senior High School (SHS) and Free Technical and Vocational Education (TVET) programmes.
President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo and Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, Vice President, will continue to increase the manpower resources and teaching facilities, including the use of ICT teaching aids, of public tertiary institutions to support the expected increases in student population from the Free SHS graduates.
This was stated in their party manifeso adding that it will also make sure no student who obtained admission to a tertiary institution was denied access because of school fees.
“We will provide all such students, with the exception of teacher and nurse trainees who are paid allowances, an option to obtain a student loan, without the requirement of a guarantor for the loan, provided the student has a National Identification Number from the Ghana Card.
“Payment of student loan will be deferred after National Service plus an additional one-year grace period.”
Government will implement the US$219 million Ghana Accountability for Learning Outcomes Project (GALOP) to improve the quality of education in 10,000 low performing basic education schools across all 260 districts and strengthen education sector equity and accountability in Ghana.
They said learning grants would be disbursed to the targeted schools as a top-up to the capitation grant; the programme will provide support and resources for teachers, support for school management, accountability systems, and monitoring and evaluation.
It said about 2.3 million pupils and 76,000 teachers from the targeted schools will benefit directly from the project; put in place a comprehensive National Teacher Policy and implement a National Digital Literacy Project for teachers.
The Next NPP Government will inject standards and professionalism into the sector.
It will ensure that, teacher education and continuous professional development, working conditions, recruitment and retention, career structure and pathways for progression, recognition and reward system, accountability, school governance, social inclusion and social dialogue are upscale.
It will also ensure the training and employment of more teachers for Early Childhood Education, Primary, French, TVET, Special Needs and other areas as needed and reduce the number of out-of-school children in Ghana by providing a uniform identification and tracking of every student.
The next NPP government will establish a national Knowledge and Assessment Bank, a comprehensive digital library to allow all Ghanaian students/learners access to learning materials and also provide a repository of assessment tools for assessing learning by teachers and instructors.
“The next NPP government will deepen the implementation and use of the iCampus portal which provides free access to educational content for the core subject areas to all SHS students.
It will continue to provide a 24-Hour dedicated television channel for the delivery of lessons on the GBC Digital Terrestrial TV (DTT) platform and the National DTT platform as a Free-to-Air Broadcast.
The NPP said it would implement a robust state of the art Learning Management System (LMS) to enable teachers create supplementary content and deliver online instruction and assessment and provide Made-in-Ghana digital devices pre-installed with digital content for SHS students and teachers.
GNA