Executive Director of Child Rights International (CRI), Bright Appiah, has applauded Minister for Education Yaw Osei Adutwum for the initiatives he is introducing to ensure Ghana gets the best from her education sector.
According to him, education should not be politicized whatsoever and praised the posture of the Minster and for consulting wide and across all the divide to be able to achieve the needed result.
He noted that challenges facing the sector did not start under the current Minister because these are deficiencies that have piled up over the years due to some of the reforms that were introduced.
“The issues in the education sector are not really new but the good news is what we are doing to deal with them today,” he said.
Speaking at an engagement with the Minister at his office on Friday, 21st January 2021, when a group of NGOs and CSOs paid him a courtesy call, Mr. Bright Appiah stated the need to take the construction of urban schools serious and how best this could be linked to day schools and how the day schools could also be crafted to address the issue of special needs.
CRI, he said, would love to see the Ministry integrate special needs within the day school system to enable children with mild forms of disability to have a feel of what is going on in the education system.
He appealed to the Ministry to build the capacity of teachers and also initiate modalities to create the most conducive environment for them in terms of accommodation and salaries and generally make their lives comfortable.
He disclosed that under the Alex Tettey-Enyo administration, the Ministry made an agreement to pay certain incentives to teachers who accept posting to rural communities.
“Till date, we have not seen that but since we have spoken about it we are expecting that something good will come out of it.”
“This is a brilliant idea of addressing issues of the environment and containing the teacher,” he said.
Mr. Bright Appiah urged the Minister to continue pursuing the good plans he is implementing but stressed the need to link these long term planning.
He assured the Minister of their support and to join him in the efforts but indicated they will also not hesitate to draw his attention to issues that may come up.
The Minister of Education, Hon. Yaw Adutwum in response indicated that the school environment is conducive but same cannot be said about the environment where teachers are working.
He assured the new schools coming up are going to be a starting point for creating that comfortable learning environment where a mathematics teacher will have artefacts on a wall, a fridge and other logistics without the need to go to the staff room.
He said, “We want to move in that path of the 21st-century classroom environment and move away from the classroom where the students are there waiting for the teacher to a place where the teacher has a key to his classroom, which presupposes that the windows must be intact so that he will feel secure to leave his bag there.”
“The new schools coming up, we’ll have smartboards; create an environment where a teacher cannot wait to get into his classroom because the classroom environment is so good and comfortable,” he added and stressed that the Ministry is already working to provide that needed learning environment for teachers.
Source: MyPublisher24.com