Tema, July 9, GNA – The Girls’ Education Unit of the Ghana Education Service (GES) with other stakeholders have organized a training workshop on the District Advocacy Taskforce on the back-to-school campaign in Tema Metropolis.
The training was to disseminate the guidelines for the prevention of teenage pregnancy among school girls and facilitate re-entry to school after childbirth.
Madam Bernice Ofori, District Education Director, in her welcome Address, lauded GES for the workshop and called for more training to sensitise both parents and collaborators on the need to cater for their wards especially in terms of needs.
She said the Back to School training was an initiative to extensively deliberate on urgent actions they could take to bring pupils back to school.
It also focuses on plans to bring the pupils especially the vulnerable and marginalized who have dropped out of school and were likely to lose out on their education back to the main streams once again.
Madam Ofori said data from the GES showed increasing trends of teenage pregnancy among girls leading to high dropout from school at the Junior High and Senior High School levels of education.
She said that although the GES desired to prevent pregnancy among school girls, it was also taking steps to ensure that girls who get pregnant while in school would get opportunities to further their education after delivery.
Mr Suleman Yusif, Programme Officer Monitoring, and Evaluation Girls Unit of the Ghana Education Service, Headquarters said coronavirus contributed to high dropout especially among girls, and charged the heads of the schools to get the children back to school.
He said some factors that prevented the students from coming back to school were that some of them have started commercial activities which they find difficult to stop and inadequate parental control.
He lauded some schools such as Mante Din, Mahean, TMA One and Two, Saint Paul’s among others for putting measures in place to increase enrollment of students after the pandemic and caution schools that had recorded low enrollment after the pandemic to strategies to attract them back.
Madam Philomena Panyin Buckman Programme Officer, Girls Education Girls Education Unit of Ghana Education Service, Headquarters, took participants through unsafe school practices, elements of safe school, measures to promote a safe school, and stakeholders’ role to make school safe.
She said some unsafe practices that led to a decrease in school enrolment were, bullying, lack of cordial relationship between teachers and students, intimidation, stigmatization, and teasing, body shaming, and others.
GNA