Rev. John Ntim Fordjour, Deputy Minister of Education, has emphasized that the nation’s education system has received a huge increase in a variety of ways during the last five years.
He said that the Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo-led government’s huge infrastructure development has resulted in a reduction in the demand for accommodation in Senior High Schools throughout the nation.
Rev. Fordjour told a segment of the media in Accra on Friday that the increased infrastructure in schools had resulted in a new cohort system in which each year group will be in school together, removing the Gold/Green double-entry of Form One and Two students.
That, he said, did not imply that the double-track system had been abandoned, but rather that it was just being managed in a new manner to facilitate management and administration.
He said that having each year group at school at the same time would relieve teachers of the strain of having to set various types of questions for the same year group owing to varied times of completing their exams and other kinds of monitoring and evaluation.
Rev. Ntim Fordjour, the Education Ministry’s Deputy Minister-in-Charge of General Education and the Member of Parliament for Assin South in the Central Region, indicated that all Form Two students will attend school as one cohort rather than two.
He was optimistic that when additional school buildings were finished, the school population will report to school as one cohort, as was the case with Single Track schools.
Rev. Ntim Fordjour told the country that regardless of cohort, pupils will get the same level of teaching; he thus asked parents not to be concerned.
Background
After weeks of waiting by anxious parents and other stakeholders in the education sector, Prof. Kwasi Opoku Amankwa, Director-General of the Ghana Education Service, announced last Friday the various reopening dates for pre-tertiary schools as well as other schemes for its operation over the next three years.
Many social analysts and social media users speculated about the double-track system and the new cohort system in response to this revelation.
Late last year, the Ministry of Education established a committee headed by Rev. Ntim Fordjour to develop a new timeline for the administration of education in the nation.
This resulted in a planned and well-structured schedule for the following three years to ensure the smooth operation of the education sector, as an attempt was made to return to the previous education calendar as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused a deviation from the regular school calendar.
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SOURCE: GRAPHIC ONLINE
