Over 20 educational partners have commended the Minister for Education, Yaw Osei Adutwum, for a successful national education week which brought together partners to review and access quality of teaching, learning and policies of government in the education sector.
The National Education Week (NEW) 2022, brought together over 600 policymakers, researchers, and practitioners to share rigorous evidence that has been collected about the impact of policies and interventions in education aimed at improving service delivery and learning outcomes in Ghana likewise, identify ways in which evidence can be used to drive the implementation of education policies and programmes to facilitate better decision-making processes.
Over 600 officials were drawn from the education ministry, officials from agencies, regional directors of education, district directors, heads of schools, representative from other ministries, development partner’s, academia, teacher unions NGOs, CSOs and the private sector.
Speaking on day three of the conference, Dr. Osei Adutwum assured that the government of President Akufo-Addo is determined to bring massive transformation into the educational sector.
“Ghana under President Akufo-Addo is changing because many things are changing in the educational sector “.
He made this known during an interview during the 2022 NEW held in Accra at the Accra International Conference Centre on the theme; “Re-Assessing Educational Policies for Effective Service Delivery and National Transformation.”
According to the minister, his outfit will continue to drive the transformational agenda of education in the country but said, even though, Ghana was doing better than other countries in terms of transformation in the educational sector, “we still need to our best to go high.”
“We have to change the way we do business. We are not close to where we can celebrate”.
Ghana, he indicated, is blessed with many talented young men and women to transform and change the fortunes of the nation and the world in general.
Talking about the current lack of engineers in the country, Dr. Osei Adutwum said the educational sector can produce about 30,000 engineers a year in Ghana instead of the current 6,000 that it was producing.
He revealed that better days were ahead of the country and therefore, Ghana can do better than what it had done in the past 60 years, urging all Ghanaians to support the transformation agenda in the educational sector.
Graduate unemployment in Ghana, the minister indicated, was something that the educational sector can take care of.
“We should produce graduates that their services are needed for. When the education sector produce graduates whose services are not needed, they have to be blamed,” he noted.
IMF NEGOTIATIONS
Vice President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia said the Akufo-Addo government will never cancel the Free Senior High School policy which has benefited a lot of Ghanaian children despite negotiations with the International Monetary Fund to seek economic bailout.
According to him, the Free SHS has promoted access to secondary education, adding that its enrollment increased from less than 900,000 students in the 2016/17 academic year, to more than 1.2 million in 2020/21.
The vice president made this known in a speech read on his behalf by the Senior Advisor to the President, Yaw Osafo Maafo, at the 2022 edition of the annual National Education Week.
“This administration spent an average, between 4.5% – 4.6% of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and between 17.6% – 24% of its national budget on education from 2019 to 2021.
The share of government expenditure in education increased marginally from 73.4% in 2019 to 74.0% in 2020”, adding that the debate should not be whether our public expenditure was too high or too low, but instead whether or not these programmes contributed to the welfare of Ghanaians and are essential for our national transformation,” he said.
Deputy Education Minister, John Fordjor, in a brief remark, stated that his outfit had the sole responsibility of contributing to the desired national transformation by recognising the strengths and weaknesses of the current system.
