Quality teacher education holds the key to national development - Minister

The Minister of State in charge of Tertiary Education, Prof. Kwesi Yankah, says the Ghanaian Child will be competitive globally by acquiring well-researched knowledge and skills for national development on the foundation of quality teacher education.

“The biggest investment we can make as a nation is to give every child the right to good quality education … and the key to achieving this is hinged on effective and efficient management of teacher education,” Professor Kwesi Yankah said.

Professor Yankah said this during the launch of the Colleges of Education Management Information System (CEMIS) at the National Council for Tertiary Education (NCTE), Accra.

In his satisfaction for seeing the fruition of the system, the Professor said, “the development and deployment of CEMIS is no doubt a landmark in the journey to formulating relevant policies for transforming teacher development and management that will accelerate teacher growth and performance in Ghana.

“This plan is to strengthen and improve educational planning and management, by implementing a comprehensive and integrated state of the art information Management System for the production of timely, accurate, and reliable information on all tertiary institutions,” he informed.

Professor Yankah indicated that the outcome of such a plan was the development of the CEMIS for the administration, management, and delivery of teaching and learning in the various Colleges of Education, observing that, “the system will ultimately support policy formulation, analysis, planning, monitoring and evaluation of issues relating to the Colleges of Education.”

The Minister of State said, in their core mandate to the Ministry of Education, the NCTE, through CEMIS, would be enabled to provide quality and effective advice and policies to government, because it would be timely in its delivery and have access to quality statistical data from the activities of the various institutions.

The Minister also observed that the system would help NCTE monitor the level of adherence to approved policies, standards, and norms as promoted by the Ministry of Education.

He said the Colleges of Education would now have a management information system, which would be capable of managing the various parts of college activities and provide a modern platform for data capturing and delivering on teaching and learning.

“CEMIS will host e-library for use by all stakeholders with access,” he added.

Professor Yankah, therefore, indicated that the other stakeholders in the education industry in Ghana would have “real time-limited data on the activities of the Colleges of Education.”

The Minister of State was full of joy for the deployment of all functional features of CEMIS in all the 46 public Colleges of Education with training conducted for end-users in the colleges.

“In addition to the CEMIS launch, we would also be updated about the progress that has been made in enabling Emergency Remote Teaching and Learning to take place in the public Colleges of Education, as well as the success of the Colleges of Education e-Learning Fund and Wi-Fi connectivity rollout, which will enable 36 colleges of Education to improve connectivity and capacity to support blended learning,” he said.

He informed that the journey of totally transforming the teacher education sector of Ghana as an example for the rest of Africa “had just begun, and together, we will reach our preferred destination of having competent, qualified, … and fully licensed professional teachers teaching in our pre-tertiary education sector.”

The CEMIS was implemented in partnership with the Transforming Teacher Education and Learning (T-TEL) Programme with funding from UKaid and support from Mastercard Foundation.