NUGS On Ghana Education System

The National Union of Ghana Students (NUGS) has called for the re-ignition of the debate on making the Ghana Education Service (GES) the employer of all teachers in Tertiary, Senior High and Basic Schools in the country. The rationale for the policy is to drastically reduce allegations and suspicious of political underpinnings regarding the boycott of lectures by university lectures. Giving a review of the year 2010 at a news conference in Accra, today, the President of NUGS, Hamza Suhuyini, noted that the year under review had witnessed lecture boycotts by teachers both in the universities and polytechnics. Mr. Suhuyini said such boycotts have caused major changes in the academic calendar of the universities with its attendant negative consequences. He noted that a careful analysis of the problem reveals the weakness in institutional memories on agreements reached between government and interest groups, adding that a much more coherent and swift co-operation between government and the university teachers could have averted the serious impact of the boycotts. The NUGS President urged Government to overhaul the Fair Wages and Salaries Commission in order to be able to settle the impact between the Commission and the Polytechnic Teachers Association of Ghana (POTAG). He also called on Government to proceed beyond the rhetoric of exposing massive corruption in the utilisation of the Capitation Grant and accelerate the pace to ensure that at least two-thirds of children who have reached school-going age benefit from the Capitation Grant and the School Feeding Programme. Mr Suhuyini stressed the need for the GES to take all measures necessary to check the unapproved bills in Senior High Schools. On the Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETFund), Mr. Suhuyini called for an education confab to discuss the curriculum content of Ghana’s education system and propose effective changes to the GETFund Act to benefit private tertiary institutions as well, while ensuring that the Fund’s resources are used for the purposes it is meant, as established by law. He urged Government to transform the infrastructural facilities of the University for Development Studies (UDS) to an appreciable level as well as give the country’s Teacher Training Colleges the needed infrastructural facelift. Mr. Suhuyini underscored the need for every Ghanaian to have an equal chance of accessing scholarships and called on the Scholarship Secretariat to ensure a transparent mode in the award of scholarships. He reminded Government of the challenges of the Senior High School education system, having two sets of batches graduating the same time, and advising that the necessary provisions should be made to avert the inability of these students not securing places in the institutions of higher learning due to their large numbers.