Okyenhene Osagyefuo Amoatia Ofori Panin has bemoaned Ghana is losing the importance of teachers hence the revered profession has rather become a stop gab job for many.
He blamed the situation on poor condition of service for the profession, therefore urged government to have better look into remuneration of teachers to make the teaching profession attractive to live up to expectation.
According to Okyenhene, the welfare of the teacher must be in the center of every educational policy and interventions thus high premium placed on the teachers.
He stated that infrastructure and logistics alone cannot ensure quality education.
“We can buy computers, we can do what we want to do in infrastructure, those will not teach our children, people do and therefore focus for me when I was growing up was my teacher. We need to place high premium on who teach our children, and therefore in the classroom is where the discipline, the high moral standards are taught and the classroom is where our characters are formed. So teachers are in the class not only teaching the subject matter, they are teaching us about life”
“Unfortunately, in this country now we are losing the importance of teachers. If I can’t get anything else then let me go and teach. I apply for jobs and there is no jobs so I will teach for a while. In Singapore teachers are important.They are well paid so I urge that for our children to have the benefit of today’s technology and advancement let us just make sure our teachers are properly taken care of”.
Okyenhene said this when speaking at the 85th Anniversary Celebration of Abuakwa State College under the theme; ” Sustaining 85 Years of quality education: The Stakeholder Factor.”
The Ghana National Association of Teachers said in 2019 that, attrition rate in the teaching profession is approximately 7000 annually due to poor working condition.
Osagyefuo Amoatia Ofori Panin called on government to prioritize the teaching profession due to its critical role in society adding that no country can develope without education.
The Minister of Education Dr.Yaw Osei Adutwum speaking on behalf of the President Akufo Addo tauted the government’s performance in education sector describing it as unprecedented.
He said the Free Senior High School Policy has increased students enrollment from 830,000 in 2016 to 1.3 million in senior high schools and TVET institutions in Ghana.
He stated that the focus of the current government in education is to turn the fortunes of the country and transform it in the future.
“Akufo Addo will go down in history as a transformer because he really wants to transform. He has great ideas and he wants to implement as Osagyefuo rightly said other nations like Singapore have transformed themselves because of education, and we can. Free SHS has increased enrollment from 830,000 from 2016 when we took over now it is 1.3million in SHS and TVET institutions. All these nations are have done so well because they increased their gross tertiary enrollment ratio of about 70%. Mauritius is now 40% and the nation is changing. South Korea enrollment is 93.6% but Ghana’s gross tertiary enrollment ratio now 20%”.