body-container-line-1
26.06.2006 Education

Nsowah assured schools of his support for discipline

26.06.2006 LISTEN
By GNA

The Acting Director General of Ghana Education Service (GES), Mr Michael K. Nsowah, has emphasized that the GES would not relax its policy on the banning of the use of mobile phones at schools.

He said parents and guardians who want their wards to be receiving telephone calls throughout the day should get employment for their wards as telephone receptionists and get them out of the schools.

Mr Nsowah was speaking at the Second Speech and Prize-Giving Day celebration of the Akuse VRA International School on Saturday at Akuse in the Eastern Region.

He charged school heads to strictly enforce discipline in their schools and assured them of his support, provided their actions were right.

Mr. Nsowah noted with concern that some parents had abandoned their responsibility to instill discipline and respect in their wards and wrongly think that it was the responsibility of schools to do that.

He observed that there was lack of agreement in the society on values, saying this often led to misunderstandings in the enforcement of discipline in the society to the extent that some parents even go to attack teachers when their wards were punished.

Mr Nsowah described the attacks on teachers as "unacceptable, sad and very embarrassing and should be discouraged." Mr. Nsowah advised people who talk about the rights of the child when students in the second-cycle institutions were sent home to collect their fees before writing their examinations to also talk about the rights of the adult.

He said during auditing of schools, the head of any school, who is found to have not collected the school fees is indicted and sometimes the promotion of such heads of school were held up for some time.

Mr Nsowah advised parents who give money to their wards to pay their school fees to be responsible enough to demand receipts or find a way of verifying from the school if the fees had been paid and should not wait till their wards were refused to write their examinations because of non-payment of fees before rushing to the offices of GES with complains.

He explained that the government textbook policy was to benefit all Ghanaian pupils either in public or private institutions and added that the problem that do confront the GES was that often, the schools, for reasons he could not explain, did not give the correct data on the population of pupils in their schools.

The Acting Director General said it was only after the distribution of the textbooks that some heads of schools come back complaining and invited the media to his office to verify signed documents from the institutions on the figures that they gave for their schools.

The Headmaster in-charge of Basic Level of the Akuse (VRA) International School, Mr A. K. Susie, said the school, which was established 24 years ago as stream "B" of the Akosombo International School, has now been registered as a private school and had a student population of 480 with 234 girls and 246 boys.

He said the school scored 100 per cent at the first two batches of students that it registered to write the Basic Education Certificate Examination(BECE) while the third batch wrote the examination this year.

Mr Susie appealed for more library books and a school bus for educational trips and for picking school children from Somanya, Kpong and Asutsuare areas.

Mr William Adjei of the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Ghana Limited, who chaired the function, called for a change of the trend of low funding for education, lack of teaching facilities and deteriorating equipments and observed that there could be no poverty reduction or growth of any sector of the economy without the contribution of the educational system.

body-container-line