GES says pregnant school girls must register to facilitate re-entry
Girls who get pregnant in school have been advised by the Ghana Education Service (GES) to notify school authorities for the necessary documentation to facilitate their smooth re-entry into school after they give birth.
Ms Patricia Birago Gyamfi, Eastern Regional Girls Education Officer of GES, who said this in an interview with GNA, noted that failure to report meant that those girls would be captured as dropouts and would therefore have no records to facilitate their re-entry in school, especially Senior High Schools (SHS).
Often, she added, some pregnant girls managed to sit for the Basic Education certificate Examination (BECE) for placement into SHS.
But the challenge was that most of them may have delivered or at the latter stages of their pregnancy, and fail to go through the registration and documentation processes when placed in school to confirm their placements and records in school.
She said such situations created a lot of challenges as students placement would be cancelled for not registering and so would have to re-write BECE to go through the replacement protocols again, which often posed a challenge to the teenage mothers.
Parents and guardians should therefore follow-up on their pregnant girls or delivered wards placements and register them, she said, by that they could have an arrangement with the school to ensure the best welfare of teenage mothers to continue their education.
Ms Gyamfi spoke about the progress of the “come back to school campaign” for teenage girls who got pregnant and others who suffered some consequences due to the covid-19 pandemic.
As part of making the “back to school” campaign achieve its objectives, she said, both staff and students in Junior and Senior High schools had been counselled and sensitised to support and relate well with pregnant or teenage mothers in the schools to encourage them stay in school.
She appealed to parents to support their pregnant girl children or those who had delivered of their babies to enable them take advantage of the re-entry policy to continue their education.
She added that “government through the GES is making it possible for teenage mothers to go back to school but parents and guardians have a critical role to play to realise the full potential of the policy”.
She described the rate at which some girls who got pregnant after BECE returned to school as encouraging in Eastern Region, noting that report from 28 out of the 33 municipalities and districts indicated many girls had taken advantage of the policy to return to school.
The Eastern Region recorded 10,856 teenage pregnancies in 2020, the second highest next to Ashanti Region, which registered 17,802 teenage pregnancies on the national chart.
The “back to school campaign” has been introduced by government to ensure that such girls returned back to school with the pregnancy or after delivery to continue their education.
Source: GNA