Mr Richard Kwashie Kovey, Campaign Against Privatisation and Commercialisation of Education (CAPCOE) Convener has called on the government to upgrade non-performing schools and monitor their performance before making decisions to shut them down. He said ‘if after investing in the schools and they are still not performing to standard, then the government can decide to shut them down. Mr Kovey in an interview with the Ghana News Agency in Tema said most of the schools described as non-performing lacked basic educational material to enable them to perform and were deficient in learning resources like laboratories, libraries, workshops, and other resources to run efficiently. He said lack of resources affected the student’s ability and desire to learn to upgrade their academic performance, ‘these are not the faults of the students, teachers or parents, but the educational establishment, so why do you punish them’. He said another problem confronting those schools were the caliber of students admitted with poor educational foundation right from the primary to Junior High level. ‘You are taking students with an aggregate of 54 into a school and you expect that within two and half years of their stay, they should perform magic. ‘These schools are also resource-challenged, definitely they cannot give you the performance that you want,’ he stated. Mr Kovey said most of the students in the category A schools already had good foundations which contributed to the progress of the performance of their schools. The CAPCOE Convener added that schools classified as performing ones classified under categories A and B had all the necessary facilities available to sharpen and boost the academic performance of its students. He added that the performance of those schools had nothing to do with the teachers and head teachers; however, the environment was not conducive enough to encourage learning adding that the initial intentions for the categorisation of the schools were not based on performance. It was to limit the number of students who would apply to the school due to the facilities they have ‘it’s only now that people are making it look like they are best-performing schools’.
Source: Ghana News Agency