EMPOWER TEACHERS TO KEEP RECORDS (DEC 28, 2009)

IT is universally accepted that education holds the key to the development process in any community.
Both formal and informal education programmes empower beneficiaries to have a better appreciation of their environment and how to manage it for the betterment of society.
Although the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) mandate all governments to, among other issues, provide free access to basic education by 2015, many developing countries are very far away from attaining that goal.
In Ghana, our governments at all times have introduced policies and regulations, especially at the basic level, to improve the environment for teaching and learning.
Over the last two decades or so, several policies have been implemented to change the direction of education from the grammar type to the hands-on-skills training programme that will help beneficiaries to be more useful to the country.
The then government in the mid 1980s introduced the educational reforms to focus more on science and technical education.
That was not all; in the 1990s, the NDC administration introduced the Free Compulsory Universal Basic Education (FCUBE) programme in order to expand access to education at the basic level.
The introduction of the Capitation Grant a few years ago helped to make education more accessible to the majority of children.
The School Feeding Programme, although not a nation-wide exercise yet, helped to motivate more parents to enrol their children in public schools.
Even with the implementation of these pragmatic policies, the country is still far away from attaining universal access to education.
Therefore, the bottlenecks militating against quality education ought to be addressed now.
Last Wednesday, the Daily Graphic carried a story which said a study by the Northern Network for Education Development (NNED), a non-governmental organisation (NGO), revealed that inadequate record keeping at both the district and school levels was one of the factors that militated against the effective implementation of the Capitation Grant policy in northern Ghana.
We dare say that this problem is not limited to northern Ghana alone but cuts across the length and breadth of the country.
The inability of the administrators of education at the district and school levels to keep records should not be encouraged because without record keeping, there cannot be transparency and accountability.
The government has allocated a sizeable amount of state resources to implement the Capitation Grant and the School Feeding Programme and everything must be done to ensure that those entrusted with the resources use them for their intended purposes.
All the stakeholders in education — teachers, parents, students, the government and communities — have a very important role to play in helping to improve the standard of education in the country.
The Daily Graphic is aware that far-reaching governance structures have been put in place in all the districts to ensure the strict supervision of our schools.
District Oversight committees, chaired by district chief executives, and School Management committees (SMCs) were established to assist school authorities to raise the standards of education.
Parent-teacher associations (PTAs) have done their best to improve infrastructure and standards in schools, but it was felt that the district assemblies must take the lead role in the administration of the educational system in order to achieve strict compliance with central government regulations.
For purposes of accountability and transparency, the Daily Graphic thinks that the time has come for the Ghana Education Service to organise skills training programmes in accounting to empower teachers to keep good records of their operations.