EduWatch urges Ministry of Education to fill the vacuum

Tema, Jan. 10, GNA – Africa Education Watch (EduWatch) has called on the Ministry of Education (MoE) to replace about 44,000 teachers who left basic schools in 2021.

In a statement copied to the Ghana News Agency on Monday, EduWatch stated that the recruitment of some 16,000 teachers is commendable, however, it did not address the deficit even halfway.

It said there was the need to engage more teachers and urged the Ministry to ensure that teachers being recruited to deprived districts would be where they were needed, devoid of any protocol considerations.

It also said the Ministry must ensure the decongestion of the many districts with surplus teachers and while teachers posted to empty classrooms in deprived districts were reposted to communities that they were most needed.

The statement said EduWatch foremost priority for 2022 was to support the MoE by monitoring teacher postings and teacher deployment in general, in line with the Minister’s vision of ‘One Teacher Per Classroom’.

EduWatch added that “our ‘Every Child Deserves a Teacher’ Campaign will be launched later this month.”

It further said, “Challenges with Standard Based Curriculum (SBC) Implementation: The first two years of implementing the SBC has been poor, due to the lack of textbooks and the myriad of planning deficits surrounding the rollout of the Junior High School (JHS) curriculum, that is Common Core Programme (CCP)”.

It urged the MoE to streamline communication on timelines for rolling out the SBC in JHS and SHS to enable proper planning, make textbooks available to all kindergartens and primary schools this term, train teachers in the CCP before roll-out this term.
It also urged the MoE to provide textbooks for the CCP in the 2022 academic year to prevent a repetition of the two-year absence of textbooks that occasioned the primary school curriculum.

GNA