Some of the participants at the orientation course. Inset: Dr. George Afeti explaining a point to the media
THE FIRST batch of zonal education inspectors have been trained on how to undertake supervision of schools throughout the country.
The zonal inspectors are to collaborate with the National Inspectorate Board (NIB), an agency under the Ministry of Education, to provide a diagnosis of what a school must do in order to improve upon its academic performance.
In a welcome address, Dr. George Afeti, Chief Inspector of Schools, explained that the motto of NIB was ?learning and not just schooling.?
According to him, although children were in school, the national education assessment tests and the West Africa Examination Council (WAEC) results over the past years demonstrated that not much learning was taking place.
?Academic achievement standards are not keeping pace with the level of resources government and other stakeholders have been allocating to the education sector, hence the poor results.
?Ensuring that learning takes place in schools and that schools performance improve and remain on the path of improvement is the primary objective of the NIB,? he added.
Dr. Afeti explained that NIB was not to replace the Ghana Education Service (GES) Inspectorate agency outside the GES. ?Basically, the NIB is the External Auditor of the pre-tertiary education system charged with the responsibility of evaluating the performance of the system.?
He therefore urged the zonal inspectors to assist the NIB in carrying out the education quality oversight responsibility.
Dr. Afeti stressed the need for politicians to make it a point that the welfare of teachers run concurrently with educational policies.
Improving the quality of education delivery was not only about school infrastructure and fee subsidies or even school inspection and supervision, but the adequate number of trained teachers.
Dr. Afeti noted that as at 2010/2011 academic year, the basic education system had 19,723 primary schools (14,431 public and 5,292 private) with a total pupil enrolment of about 3.9 million as against 3.8 million during the previous academic year.
?Currently the total number of primary school teachers stands at 124,359, a figure which is 5.1% lower that the 131,057 teachers in the primary schools in the previous year. The data reveals that only 62.8% of teachers in public primary schools and 11.2% in private primary schools are trained,? he said.
The situation at the junior high school (JHS) is not different. The total enrollment of JHS is 1,335,400 representing an increase of 2.6% on the previous year?s figures. The percentage of trained teachers at the JHS level is a respectable 78.4% in public schools and 20.3% in private schools
The major challenge is that the total number of JHS teachers have dropped by 11% between 2009 and 2010 from 73520 to 65186 in public schools and from 20221 to 18,153 with regard to private schools.
By Stella Danso Addai
