Dr Yaw Osei Adutwum, Minister of Education, has urged Regional Directors of Education to develop leadership skills and support the government’s agenda of transforming education.
Dr Adutwum advised the Regional Directors to retool themselves and explore innovative ways of improving education to fit government agenda of education for national development.
Speaking at a stakeholder engagement for all Regional Directors of education in Accra, the Minister said the government was committed to improving on their leadership skills as they use their leadership positions to bring out the expected outcome in the country’s education system.
“We want our Regional Directors of Education to look at how they will move our education system forward. We have talked about a number of issues but the most prominent is the need for intervention in our schools.”
“If a student goes to the Senior High School for the first year and cannot read, do we still ask them to do a certain number of electives without looking at making interventions like a class for Mathematics, or English within the school day so that they can improve their skills in subjects overtime.
“If we do a placement for example in High School and you cannot write then you are not going to do six electives. Therefore, you will get an additional English class to help you to develop your reading and writing skills so that by the time you get to the University you can write,” he said.
The Minister said the government was also looking at the issue of school dropouts in various regions which was a concern, adding that the Ministry was working assiduously to solve the situation so that all students can have access to quality education.
“Our analysis of data has shown that there is a gap between students from Oti, Volta and the Northern Regions as compared to the other regions, and a huge gap among students in the Basic Education Certificate Examination level and the West African Senior Secondary Certificate Examination level.”
He said the government had developed strategies to address the situation and bridge the educational gap in the system through the introduction of the National Standards Test.
The Minister said under the new pre-tertiary education curriculum, all primary four pupils in public schools would in November 2021 write the new National Standards Test to assess their knowledge, skills, and performance for feedback and response.
He said the government was starting with primary four because of COVID-19 and stressed that when the pandemic was under good control, the test would be extended to primary two and six.
The National Standards Test is in response to Ghana’s Education Strategic Plan from 2018 to 2030, which prioritised improving learning outcomes at all levels by creating a national standards-based assessment at the pre-tertiary level, to measure the quality of learning achievements before the end of Junior High School.
Professor Kwasi Opoku-Amankwa, Director General, Ghana Education Service, said the engagement was to have a discussion on how to develop strategies and improve on the learning outcomes in school.
“We are discussing issues relating to resources, strategies, facilities, staffing and everything that would help us to have a good environment for effective teaching and learning.
We have to get a clear vision on what to do and have to know the policies and programmes of the state so that we can easily project them,” he said.
