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Better late than never
Over 5,000 Ghana Education Services (GES) teachers are to be paid in arrears, announced the Ministry of Finance. The Ministry of Education will work with the Controller and Accountant-General (C&AGD) to ensure that teachers would receive the salaries they are entitled to. The focus of the C&AGD will be on paying the GES teachers whose salaries are in excess of three months. The Ministry of Finance has insisted that both the C&AGD and the MOE treat the matter as “urgent.” The process will require a collaboration of the two public offices to activate, process, and validate employment data.
Tech company invests in Ghanaian education
A new kindergarten in the suburb of Takoradi has reached completion and is set to enroll children starting in September. The Holy Child Kindergarten Centre of Excellence is notable for having secured partial fundraising from FMC technologies, a leading provider of technologies and services to the oil and gas industry. The investment is encouraging and hopefully a sign of what’s to come as Takoradi increases its prominence as a major player in the West African oil environment.
In other kindergarten news
The governance and policy NGO Good Governance West Africa is planning to pilot a new kindergarten education initiative in the Central Tongu district. Kindergarten, Education, Yardsticks and Yields (KEYY) is their attempt at improving education for four to six year olds. While the details of the initiative aren’t entirely clear yet, the lead researcher, Ekem Amonoo-Larson, mentioned that the pilot would “bring renewed thinking to current policy related to teaching at the kindergarten level in the local language and English as well as bringing the private sector on board to support kindergartens and trained teachers particularly at the district level.”
“Stop making education a political issue”
In a recent speech, Professor Kwesi Yankah voiced his frustration with the politicization of Ghana’s educational system. His gripe is with the reversion back to the three year senior high school system. In 2007, the NPP administration implemented the four year Senior High School program. However, in 2009, when the NDC assumed power, they quickly abandoned the four year program without properly examining its effects. In doing so, the NDC allowed for the education system to become a casualty of partisan politics. Furthermore, because it is now being painted with a political brush, debating the merits of the four year system is no longer a conversation about what is best for the country or its students, it is a conversation of what is most politically palatable.
WASSCE results serve as a useful reminder
The April/May 2016 West African Senior Secondary Certification Examination (WASSCE) results are in, and they aren’t particularly encouraging. Over two-thirds of students failed to pass. The test requires students pass each of the four core subjects (math, English, science, and social studies). Failing any single subject will cause a student to be ineligible for admission to any legally recognized university in Ghana. The results show that math and science were the areas where students struggled the most, causing many outsiders to say the education system is broken. Furthermore, nearly 2,300 candidates had their results cancelled for cheating. The poor results, though an improvement over 2015, serve as a reminder that there is still much work to be done in the education sector. Systemic cheating and mass failure highlight that students are showing up for the WASSCE woefully unprepared.