Koforidua (E/R), Jan. 12, GNA – Africa Education Watch (Eduwatch), an education policy research and advocacy organization, has decried high attrition rate among teachers and promises to assist in the monitoring of teacher posting and deployment this year.
The policy research think tank observed that the Ministry of Education recorded about 44,000 (over 15 per cent) basic school teacher resignations in 2021 without replacement.
It commended the Ministry for its ongoing efforts to recruit some 16,000 teachers, but added, “While the ongoing efforts…is commendable, it does not even address the deficit halfway.”
The African Eduwatch, which said this in a statement copied to the Ghana News Agency, urged the education ministry to ensure that all teachers being recruited and posted to deprived areas were “devoid of any kind of protocol considerations.”
Again, “the many districts with surplus teachers should be decongested, and the teachers reposted to empty classrooms in deprived districts where they are most needed.”
The statement described the first two years of the Standard Based Curriculum (SBC) as poor, blaming it on the lack of textbooks to support the implementation process.
Checks by the Ghana News Agency in Koforidua on the availability of books for basic schools in the local market showed that only two publishing textbook firms were mostly recommended.
The recommended firms are the Golden Series and the Excellence Series. However, it was also discovered that the Golden Series was out of the market due to some contradictions on various topics in their books.
To remove these bottlenecks, Eduwatch called on the Ministry of Education to streamline communication on timelines for rolling out the SBC in Junior High School and Senior High School for proper planning.
Also, it must make available textbooks to all Kindergarten and primary schools this term and train teachers on the Common Core Programme (CCP), which is the curriculum for JHS before its rollout, as well as provide CCP textbooks for the 2022 academic year.
The organisation believes its proposed measures would go a long way to “prevent a repetition of the two-year absence of textbooks that occasioned the primary school curriculum.”
GNA