Ensuring quality education at local level-Govt is empowering communities

THE Minister of Education, Mr Alex Tettey Enyo, has restated the government’s commitment to empowering local communities in the running of educational institutions to ensure quality education at the local level.
He has, therefore, directed the Director-General of the Ghana Education Service (GES), Mr Samuel Bannerman-Mensah, to ensure the proper functioning of School Management Committees (SMCs) and Parent Teacher Associations (PTAs) in all schools.
Mr Tettey Enyo gave the directive at the national Forum on Lessons Acquired for Good Practices in Community Participation in Education held at the Wangara Hotel in Accra.
The programme is a collaboration between the GES and the Government Accountability Improves Trust Programme (GAIT II) and supported by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
The minister said education was a social activity that called for the collective and concerted contribution of the local people.
He noted that many communities had over the years contributed significantly towards the development and delivery of quality education in the country, adding that “many basic schools in Ghana were originally initiated at the community level where teachers were recruited within the local community to teach the children”.
Mr Tettey Enyo said the issue of community involvement in education got eroded as a result of the management and control of education by central government, which, he said, made the control of the educational system central.
To mitigate this effect, the GES and the Ministry of Education implemented the policy establishing and empowering SMCs and PTAs in all basic schools, he noted.
These bodies, according to the sector minister, constituted a partnership between the school and community leaders in effecting school improvement and management efficiency programmes.
Mr Tettey Enyo said the GAIT II programme had therefore come as good news to the GES and the ministry as the role of SMCs and PTAs had become very crucial in educational management.
Mr Bannerman Mensah said schools with well structured SMCs and PTAs had over the years seen significant improvement in the management and administration of their schools.
He stressed the need for the involvement of district education officers, parents and the districts assemblies to be done with the goal of developing civic involvement in local governance and education, through partnership with local citizens and local government.
He assured stakeholders that the recommendations by the GAIT II programme would be carefully considered and implemented to achieve the needed impact in education.
For his part, Dr Eric Johnson of the USAID said the GAIT II programme was to actively engage citizens through their civic union in decision making regarding education in their communities to address issues that were of concern to their schools.
Dr Johnson said the programme had so far covered 25 districts out of the 700 districts under the GES, adding that all the 25 communities in which the GAIT II programme was operating had achieved massive improvement in education.
He said quality education at all levels had the potential of eradicating poverty and other forms of underdevelopment in the country.
He tasked the participants to identify the strategies which had worked and those that did not work, to enable them to know which of them to modify in the years ahead.
Dr Johnson said the programme which started in 2004 would fold up by the end of July this year.
He therefore called on district education units to consider the proper implementation of the policies and recommendations of the GAIT II programme.