Tema, Feb. 24, GNA – Naa Ju Yoo Tsofayelor I, Ga Traditional Leader on Wednesday appealed to the Ghana Education Service (GES) to review its policy of transferring or posting local language teachers outside their home region.
She said to cure the apparent lack of professional Teachers to teach Ga Language in some basic schools in the Greater Accra Region, GES and the Ministry of Education must consider not to post professionally trained Ga teachers outside the Region.
Naa Tsofayelor I, who is also an advocate of the Ga Language in an interview with the Ghana News Agency at Tema attributed the problem to the lack of fairness in posting Professional Ga Trained Teachers.
The posting of these teachers outside the region is the fundamental problem making teachers lose the interest in pursuing Ga Language at the training schools.
Ga Traditional Leader, who is an advocate for the language revealed that some parents in the Region had for some years now complained about the teaching of other local language in schools in the Region at the expense of Ga, which is the local language of Ghana’s capital.
The Ghana News Agency investigations revealed that most schools especially the private ones had replaced the teaching of Ga Language with other non-indigenous language, which they attributed to the lack of teachers for the subject.
Naa Tsofayelor observed that the number of teachers pursuing the language were encouraging some years back, but claimed that the situation changed when authorities started posting such professionals outside the Region to teach other subjects especially English language and Social Studies.
“If the number of students studying Ga language at the professional level are few, why post them outside Accra to teach other subjects, when you know they are needed in Accra to teach the native language?
The traditional leader added that “If Adukwei graduates from the teacher training school as a Ga, English, teacher and she is posted elsewhere to teach English instead of being posted to Accra to teach Ga, where her services are urgently needed, will she encourage Amartey to study Ga language at the professional level?
She appealed to the authorities to stir up interest in the study of the language emphasizing that even though some people blamed the development on Ga Traditional Leaders, one major factor had to do with posting.
Recently, a notice from Valley View University Basic Schools in Oyibi in the Kpone-Katamanso Municipality to parents indicated that the school like many others in the Region was phasing out the teaching of Ga in the school.
“We wish to inform you that Management of the Basic School is gradually phasing out Ga as a Ghanaian language starting from the 2021 academic year. This is due to the difficulty in getting qualified teachers to teach the subject,” the school stated in a circular which attracted public euphoria.
GNA