Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT) describe as an unfortunate warning by Education Minister to sack school heads who superintend over a 90 percent failure rate.
GNAT Secretary, David Acheampong says the teacher cannot be solely responsible for the failures in our basic education.
Education Minister Dr Matthew Opoku Prempeh warned that basic and second cycle school heads who record 90 percent or more failure in their final exams will be sacked.
He said the persistent poor performance of the students in the West Africa Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) is unacceptable demanding that the school heads justify their continued stay in their positions.
Addressing heads of senior high schools (SHS) in Kumasi as part of a two-day familiarization tour to the Ashanti Region he emphasised that the Ministry would not continue to accommodate school heads who superintend over consistent poor performance.
But Mr Acheampong said “they see the comment as very unfortunate because we do not know on what basis he arrived at that decision. We don’t know what his vision and mission as far as basic education are concerned.”
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“We believe that as a newly appointed minister he should have met with stakeholders, lied his plans for the sector bare, look at what the challenges are, and look at what as practitioners in the education sector we could do to help him achieve his objectives.”
He bemoans therefore why Dr Prempeh has not done all this but has gone out to make such a blanket statement adding “we don’t think as an association we would accept that.”
According to him, threatening teacher is not the solution when one has not checked to see that all the logistics needed for teaching and learning are available which GNAT laments are not in most schools.
“It is not the aim of the Association to shield teachers and protect them…in fact we are not sacrosanct, as a matter of fact, we do accept that some of our teachers are not performing, but we cannot use it as a blanket statement and say that he would sack the head,” he stated.
Mr Acheampong suggested that going forward there should be stakeholders meeting for the minister to tell them what his vision and mission are and how he intends to accomplish such vision.
