One Teacher Per Classroom vision must be made fruitful - EduWatch

Africa Education Watch (EduWatch), an Education Policy Research and Advocacy Organization, has expressed its commitment to ensuring that the “One Teacher Per Classroom” vision of the Government was achieved this year.

It said the initiative launched last year would help facilitate teaching patterns, learning outcomes, and most importantly release over congestion in urban schools and place teachers in all classrooms of rural schools.

In an interview with the Ghana News Agency (GNA), Mr Kofi Asare, the Executive Director of EduWatch, said if teachers were fairly deployed, 99 per cent of schools would have the adequate number of teachers needed to run their schools.

“Teachers must not hang around urban schools and leave the rural schools empty that one plus one equation must work for our educational system.

“The protocol chain must be broken to ensure that new teachers are posted to areas where needed, students in the rural areas must not lack just because they are in the village,” he added.

The Executive Director said to help put the Government’s vision into fruition, they were embarking on a nationwide exercise dubbed “Monitoring Teacher Deployment.”

The exercise, he said, was to keenly check that teachers were not merely posted but sent to places where they were supposed to be.

He said they would also check the deficit in rural areas, report back to the Ministry of Education (MoE) and propose what could be done to bridge the gap and ensure that rural and urban schools were matching squarely.

So far, Mr Asare said they had visited 60 schools in 15 districts in the Greater Accra, Northern, Upper East and Brong Ahafo Regions.

He commended the MoE for recruiting some 16,000 teachers, adding that though it had helped to balance the teacher deficit situation, there was the need to do more.

He urged teachers to gladly move to rural areas to help raise standards, adding “don’t be discouraged in any way, this is for God and country and you have to be effective, be motivated that you are serving mother Ghana,” he said.