The poor quality of education in public basic schools has been attributed to the excessive centralization of school management at the national level. Renowned educationist Emeritus Prof. Stephen Adei pointed out that concentrating management power at the Ghana Education Service (GES) headquarters has disempowered head teachers at the school level. This disempowerment has led to a breakdown of values and enforcement mechanisms in the education system.
“Give headteachers the right to recruit teachers because if head teachers are empowered to hire and fire, teachers will sit up and do the right things to improve on quality education,” he pointed out during a panel discussion at the Graphic National Development Series (GNDS) held at the University of Professional Studies, Accra (UPSA) auditorium yesterday.
The GNDS is a platform meant to address key national development issues and build consensus on strategic policies. Yesterday’s event, which was focused on education, was on the theme: “A critical look at education and culture in Ghana to chart a course of national development, peace and our prosperity.”
Key issues that emerged were the falling standards of education in public schools, moral decadence in public schools, the quality of teachers, and the relevance of the current education system. Touching on the falling quality of education in public basic schools, Emeritus Prof.Adei said until the issue of leadership in public basic schools was addressed and head teachers given the powers to enforce discipline without fear or favour, the standards would continue to fall.
“Teachers in most of the private basic schools are not trained as compared with those in public schools, yet they deliver better results; and this is because of the leadership problem in public basic schools,” he stressed. Again, he said, the training regime for teachers in the colleges of education was not up to standard so graduates from those schools were unable to deliver on the job.
He said apart from knowledge deficiency, the teachers also lacked moral values that would be instilled in students.
“My private school recruited three teachers who had diploma certificates from renowned public universities,but we sacked them within one week because of the low quality of their service,” he said. The renowned educationist said education without values was dangerous for national development as it created a leeway for corruption and other social ills to thrive.
“We are at the point where pupils pay money to be given support during their Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE), and that is why we see corruption everywhere in our national life. Unless we deal with the root causes of this situation, we are going nowhere,” he said. Prof.Adei stressed the need for an education system that engendered a change of mindset if the country had to develop.
Sharing his thoughts on technical and vocational education and training (TVET), Prof.Adei said the country would have to put its money where its mouth was by investing more in TVET. In the view of the renowned educationist, the country had reached the point where TVET needed to be prioritised to provide the human resources needed for sustainable development.
He emphasised that the time had come for the government to roll out a special scholarship scheme for TVET across all sectors of education. Prof.Adei underscored the need to establish and equip resource centres for TVET to thrive. “If we want to make TVET first, our salary structure should also prioritise it above other disciplines,” he added.
Responding to a question regarding the use of artificial intelligence (AI) by young people, he said it was important for the national development plan to put TVET at the core of the transformation agenda going forward.
By: Emmanuel Bonney & Timothy Ngnenbe
