GNECC meets on basic education

Ghana National Education Campaign Coalition (GNECC), an educational organization that seeks to promote access to quality basic education in Ghana, has held a round table discussion to deliberate on issues concerning basic education in deprived districts in Ghana.

The theme for the discussion was: “School Resource Tracking Survey in Derived Districts”.

In his address, the National Coordinator of GNECC, Leslie Tettey, disclosed that his outfit which has been in existence for 11-years now aims at providing quality education for school children living in deprived communities.

He said GNECC campaigns for this objective by setting up research committees to investigate the educational background of these deprived schools with regards to their needs and what they are lacking.

Mr. Tettey revealed that, it was GNECC which advocated for the increase in the capitation grant from ¢3as it was in 2009 to ¢4.5 as it is now.

He stated that the deprived school survey was to help identify inadequacies in the educational distribution system to ensure efficiency and to work towards blocking any loopholes in the item distribution chain.

The GNECC national coordinator noted that another objective of the research was to provide stakeholders in education with critical information, fine tune existing policies and to formulate new ones where necessary.

On details of the research findings, Mr. Awoonor Williams, a research consultant, revealed that the research took place in 8 out of the 53 deprived districts listed by the Ghana Education Service (GES).

He maintained that 20 schools were randomly selected from each district while a total number of 160 schools were covered from 7 southern regions of Ghana.

According to Mr. Awoonor, the research was to find, among other things, the number of trained teachers at post in the deprived schools, the availability of classrooms, school uniforms, sanitary facilities and text books available to the schools.

He revealed however that out of the 18, 124 English textbooks which were dispatched by the District Education Offices (DEOs), only 13,998 were received by the 155 schools that were allocated the textbooks with a variance of -29.48%.

The research consultant reiterated that out of the 8,570 science books that the DEOs dispatched to 109 schools, only 8,022 were received with a variance of -6.83%.

Mr. Awoonor continued that there was lack of trained teachers in these deprived schools as the pupil teacher ratio in survey districts was lower than the recommended national ratio as compared to the higher ratio in quality pupil rained teacher.

Touching on the availability of classrooms, the researcher said about 38% of the schools surveyed has combined classes, adding that only 23% of the schools received the first tranche of the 2009\2010 at the beginning of the first term.

In an interview with the paper, Hon Mathias Asoma Puozaa, MP for Nadowli East Constituency and Chairman of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Education, said that government has ordered the DEOs and Assemblymen of the deprived districts to submit at least 3 schools each to the GETFund.

He pointed out that government has allocated funds to these deprived schools for them to be well catered for.

GNECC further called on government to expedite action on basic things affecting deprived basic schools in the country.