Ghana’s education policymakers have identified the administrative middle layer between schools and central government as the critical missing piece in efforts to improve how children learn, launching a structured national dialogue to tackle a problem that has persisted through multiple reform cycles.
The inaugural National Policy Dialogue (NPD) on foundational learning, held in Accra under the theme “Leadership for Foundational Learning: Strengthening the Middle Tier in Ghana,” brought together the Ministry of Education (MoE), the Ghana Education Service (GES), and the Learning Generation Initiative (LGI) alongside international partners to address why national-level investments in education have consistently failed to reach classrooms at full strength.
Deputy Minister of Education Dr. Clement Apaak framed the challenge in direct terms, stating that no education system can succeed if children are not able to read, write, and count, and acknowledging persistent gaps in outcomes between rural and urban schools and between better-resourced and under-resourced institutions. He said foundational learning had been designated a core pillar of the current education reform agenda, with science, mathematics, reading, and cultural literacy identified as priority areas.
The argument for focusing on the middle tier, comprising district and regional education offices, rests on a straightforward premise: national policies and resources lose effectiveness when the institutions responsible for translating them into classroom practice lack capacity. Dr. Apaak said strengthening that administrative layer was essential to ensuring that investments yielded results rather than dissipating between the national level and individual schools.
The LGI used the dialogue to unveil a new publication titled Strengthening the Middle Tier, developed in collaboration with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP). The framework maps seven core functions of effective middle-tier leadership and identifies nine levers for improvement, including clearly defined roles, competent and motivated personnel, effective public financing, and the strategic use of data and research. It is designed to give government a structured method for identifying institutional constraints at the district and regional level and linking those constraints to learning outcomes for children.
GES Director-General Prof. Ernest Davis said early learning provides the essential base for all subsequent education and committed the service to systemic, sustained reforms rather than isolated programmes.
Education expert and chairman of the occasion Prof. Anamuah-Mensah warned that weak foundational skills compound over time, widening inequality and deepening poverty, and called on stakeholders to move from diagnosis to concrete action. “The future of Ghana rests on the foundation we give our children today; if we give them a strong foundation, we will not be disappointed,” he said.
The dialogue gains urgency against the backdrop of declining national examination results. The 2025 West African Senior School Certificate Examination results showed Core Mathematics pass rates falling to 48.73 percent from 66.86 percent in 2024, with Social Studies and Integrated Science recording similarly sharp drops, a trajectory that civil society groups have attributed in part to weak foundational literacy and numeracy carried forward from basic school.
