The Volta Regional Director of Education, Mr. Emmanuel Keteku, has called on the people of the region to stop the blame game as to who is responsible for the poor performance of students who write the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE).
To him, stakeholders should instead adopt pragmatic and coordinated efforts to reverse the trend.
Mr. Keteku stressed that the time had come for the various stakeholders in education to effectively play their roles, because there could not be any meaningful education, if stakeholders failed to live up to expectation.
Delivering a paper on the topic, “Quality Education Delivery at the Basic Level, Challenges and the Way forward”, organised by ActionAid Ghana, the Regional Director of Education pointed out that effective planning at the district and municipal levels was crucial, saying “failure to plan is planning to fail.”
Mr. Keteku observed that areas where there were no planning for effective education, the planning would be done by what he described as “planning by default,” explaining that such default planning was mostly seen when teachers who are supposed to be in the classrooms decide to use class hours for their private businesses.
He called on teachers to be disciplined at all times and show greater commitment to work, stressing that any teacher who absented him or herself from school for ten days would not be tolerated. According to him, the period the teacher absented himself would be calculated in monetary terms and deducted from the teacher’s salary.
He mentioned such problems as funding of education, and disclosed that since 2012, the government’s support for education had dwindled, and this had contributed to some of the problems. Mr. Keteku also noted that there were too many excess teachers in the Ho and Hohoe municipalities, but his outfit had not
started the transfer of these excess teachers to districts which do not have enough of them, because of liquidity problems.
He also revealed that the Ghana Education Service (GES) would no longer have control over posting of trained teachers, as a result of the decision taken by the government not to pay allowances for trained teachers.
According to Keteku, the government’s decision to withdraw the payment of allowances to the teacher trainees had created equal opportunities for both government and privately established collages of education in the country. The Volta Region Development Planning Officer, Mr. Christopher Afenyo, noted that the region had many opportunities for rapid development, and called on the people to take advantage of the numerous development opportunities such as the fertile agriculture land, and tourism potentials to develop the region.
Mr. Afenyo, however, advised the people to be environmentally friendly in exploiting the numerous development opportunities, and mentioned in particular, timber products and the salt industry. The Deputy Country Director of ActionAid Ghana, Mr. Saani Yakubu, said his outfit was committed to helping in the development of the Volta Region.
Source: The Chronicle
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