By Elizabeth Larkwor Baah, GNA
Tema, July 17, GNA – Mr Richard Kwashie Kovey, the Convenor, Campaign Against Privatization and Commercialization of Education (CAPCOE), has cautioned the Ghana Education Service (GES) against any plans to undertake mass transfers of teachers from urban and peri-urban schools to hard-to-reach communities.
Mr Kovey said such a move could worsen the quality of teaching and learning in many public schools instead of addressing the shortage of teachers in deprived areas.
He explained to the Ghana News Agency (GNA,) in an interview, that the best solution would be to temporarily freeze new teacher postings to urban schools while newly recruited teachers were posted to schools with vacant classrooms and inadequate professional teachers.
According to him, using the pupil teacher ratio as the main basis for declaring schools overstaffed does not present the true picture of staffing needs, adding that although the ratio might suggest that some schools have more teachers than required, it did not consider the large class sizes, subject specialisation and workload faced by teachers, particularly in densely populated urban communities.
Mr Kovey said many schools in rapidly developing urban areas had classes with between 60 and 150 pupils due to inadequate infrastructure, noting that under ideal conditions, each classroom should have no more than 30 pupils, or rather, between 15 and 25 pupils for effective play-based teaching and learning.
He said if enough classrooms were available, a class of 150 pupils would be divided into several streams, each requiring its own teacher.
Using a Junior High School with an enrolment of about 450 pupils as an example, Mr Kovey explained that posting only seven teachers because of district pupil teacher ratio calculations to such a school would place excessive pressure on teachers.
The CAPCOE convenor said while one teacher handled classroom instruction, another would be left with hundreds of exercise books to mark before the next day’s lessons, stating that staffing decisions should consider the need for specialised subject teachers.
He explained that schools in Accra often required teachers for different Ghanaian languages such as Ga, Twi and Ewe because pupils come from diverse language backgrounds, noting that the Career Technology subject also covered different areas that required more than one teacher to meet the interests and learning needs of students.
He said these practical realities were often overlooked when staffing decisions relied solely on statistical ratios and questioned whether the GES was prepared to pay transfer grants if affected teachers challenged the transfers in court.
Mr Kovey also asked whether the reduced number of teachers left in urban schools would be able to cope with increasing class sizes without affecting learning outcomes and urged education authorities to reconsider the policy and examine the situation from the perspective of classroom teachers.
He suggested that the Director General of GES, departmental heads and consultants involved in the policy should spend one week teaching in overcrowded classrooms before making final decisions.
Mr Kovey acknowledged the need for prudent management of public resources but stressed that long-standing educational challenges could not be solved through cost management measures alone.
He called on GES to withdraw the proposed directive, review its staffing approach and develop solutions that addressed the root causes of teacher distribution and inadequate school infrastructure, warning that failure to review the policy could result in a learning crisis and negatively affect the quality of education across the country.
GNA
Edited by Laudia Anyorkor Nunoo/Benjamin Mensah
Reporter: Elizabeth Larkwor Baah GNA
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