Teachers To Retire @ 65

Dr. George Afeti, New Chief Inspector of Schools explaining issues to the media.

Posted on: www.dailyguideghana.com

By William Yaw Owusu

Thursday July 21, 2011.
Dr. George Afeti, Chief Inspector of Schools at the newly established National Inspectorate Board (NIB) of the Ministry of Education says there will be no duplication of functions as far as supervision and evaluation of schools are concerned, as he dropped the hint of possibly pushing teachers retiring age to 65 years.

Observers have expressed worry that the establishment of the NIB will further complicate the way and manner public and private pre-tertiary education in the country are monitored as the Ghana Education Service (GES) already has an Inspectorate Unit that is performing similar function.

However, Dr. Afeti insists that there is no cause for alarm because the NIB has specifically been established under the new Education Act (Act 778 of 2008) to “provide an independent external evaluation of the quality and standards in both public and private pre-tertiary educational institution.”

At their maiden news conference at the former Local Organizing Committee (LOC) for CAN 2008 African Cup of Nations premises in Accra, Dr. Afeti was optimistic that the board’s recommendations would be enforceable to help to uplift the standard of basic education in the country.

He said the board has been mandated to help improve the quality of teaching and learning in schools and added that they are expected to provide diagnosis of what a school must do to improve, looking out particularly for specific interventions required for quality improvements throughout the country.

Dr. Afeti who is a former Rector of Ho Polytechnic said they also have the mandate to undertake periodic inspection of schools, make and enforce recommendations, evaluate the quality of teaching and learning set and enforce quality standards that must be observed at the pre-tertiary level.

He said whilst the GES Inspectorate Division is conducting what he called “internal” inspections his outfit will carry out “external” inspection and evaluation of the system adding “the board will provide independent summative evaluations of schools performance and make recommendations for improvement.”

Dr. Afeti said currently the board is expected to cover about 48,000 schools nationwide while the board will employ only 20 highly qualified staff as supervisors with over 300 experience retired educationists on a work-and-pay basis to support the 20.

He said currently close to half of teacher population in the country is not professionally trained and that accounted for the shortfall of the teacher/pupil ratio adding “schooling has gone up due to social laudable interventions such as Capitation Grant, School Feeding, Free Textbooks and Uniforms but teaching is suffering.”

He said problems associated with the work of teaching needs urgent attention if the standards and quality of teaching and learning is to improve saying “sometimes, the public should not be too quick to blame the teachers because there are real problems confronting their work.”

Dr. Afeti they will look into whether the retirement age for teachers which is currently pegged at 60 be changed to 65 because most of the teacher who are retiring at 60 still have extraordinary skills to continue to teach.

He promised independence and transparency in the work of the board adding “our role is not only to advise on what must be done but also apply sanctions where necessary.”