Ghana’s education system remains robust – Minister
Professor Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang, the Minister of Education, has said the country’s educational system remains robust and the Ministry is encouraged by the gains being made.
She said several international reports have been highly complementary of Ghana’s efforts and that Ghana ranks amongst the highest performing countries in human development in Sub-Saharan Africa.
She also cited the Overseas Development Institute, of the United Kingdom, which praised the tangible gains Ghana has made in the provision of quality education in their report captioned: “Ghana, the rising star: Progress in political voice, health and education,” published in March this year.
She said this in a statement issued in Accra and copied to the Ghana New Agency in response to the recently published Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report on school rankings, which ranked Ghana at the bottom of 76 countries.
The Education Minister said Ghana’s educational system is not a failed one, and that, the OECD ranking on mathematics and science at age 15 featured only 76 countries including five African countries with Ghana at the bottom.
She said the country has successively won the three top awards in the West African Secondary School Certificate Examinations for the last five years.
The 2014 Global Information Technology Report of the World Economic Forum also highlighted significant successes and ranked Ghana 46th out of 148 countries in the world in terms of quality of education system, while in the area of Mathematics and Science, Ghana was ranked 2nd in Africa and 62nd in the world, she said.
Prof Opoku-Agyeman said until the full report is formally presented at the World Education Forum in South Korea next week, it is important to be circumspect at this stage and to acknowledge that the details on the methodology and the period covered in this first ever OECD report on school rankings are not provided.
She said Government has also engaged the services of globally renowned mathematicians like Prof Francis Allotey and Prof Sitsope Anku, to retrain thousands of mathematics and science teachers to meet Government’s objective.
Prof Opoku-Agyeman also said 12 million core English, Mathematics and Science text books have been provided to meet the required textbook-pupil ratio and over 50,000 computers over the last two years have also been distributed.
She said the Ministry of Education is determined to continue improving the standard of education and has put in place measures to ensure quality teaching and learning at all levels of the educational system in the country.
Source: GNA