Global Partnership for Education has committed itself towards allocating $ 50 million to Ghana to address the issues of regional and gender related inequalities resulting in the poor performance of pupils at the basic educational level from poor districts.
The organisation is a multilateral partnership, devoted to getting all children into school for quality education.
The money will be used by deprived districts to redress the imbalances accounting for their poor performance.
A Deputy Minister of Education, Mr Mahama Ayariga, made this known at a press conference in Accra to announce new reforms at the first and second cycle levels of education.
The reforms include compulsory school management training programmes for headteachers and headmasters of all public schools, review of the tenure of headteachers and headmasters, abolition of the use of length of stay in a school as requirement for headship of schools, greater autonomy for school management, as well as annual publication of Ghana Schools League Table.
On the school management training, Mr Ayariga said, that would constitute a radical departure from the erroneous assumption that all teachers could easily assume school management roles without appropriate school management training, adding that teaching in a school and the management of the school were two different functions, hence the need to develop management competencies of teachers who assumed management roles.
He said the present arrangement where a person on assumption of the status of headteacher stayed in that position until he or she retired did not “in our opinion encourage accountability of heads”.
“Security of tenure as heateacher or headmsater must be tied to performance. Consequently, the Ministry of Education has directed the Ghana Education Service (GES) to review the conditions of service of headteachers and headmasters to limit their tenure of office to five years, renewable, subject to demonstrated improvement in the performance of the school,” he said.
Mr Ayariga said the ministry believed if the security of tenure of headteachers and headmasters was tied to performance there would be greater accountability in school management.
The present policy which ensured that the most senior teacher in a school ascended to the status of headteacher or headmaster, he said, “is to be reviewed so that all teachers with a minimum of five years classroom teaching experience who obtained school management from the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA) or any accredited tertiary institution, could be appointed as a headteacher or headmaster.
“School headship will henceforth be based on appropriate management competence and not necessarily a function of how long you have been a teacher at a school, he said.
Mr Ayariga directed the GES to review the administrative powers of school heads with a view to devolving more powers to headteachers and headmasters.
He said to enhance school management accountability, the ministry would cause to be published in the newspapers and on its website an annual league table displaying the performance of all basic and second cycle schools in the assessment instruments that had been developed by the Chief Inspector of Schools.
He said the measures which aimed at improving school management should have significant impact on school performance.
With regard to the delivery of teaching and learning materials to poor performing districts, Mr Ayariga said, the ministry had directed that teaching and learning materials meant for schools in the Northern, Upper East and Upper West Regions and the northern Volta and Brong Ahafo regions should always be delivered to them with dispatch and at the expense of central government, instead of insisting that the districts should come to Accra for the goods themselves.
He dismissed recent publication by the Statesman newspaper that the 2011 Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) results were the worse in 13 years, explaining that 59.45 per cent qualified for placement into senior high schools (SHSs) and not 46.93.
Original source
Last Modified: March 01, 2012
