GES Reviews Private Schools Guidelines

The Ghana Education Service (GES) is reviewing the policy guidelines establishing private educational institutions to ensure their strict compliance with the rules and regulations governing the establishment of those institutions to improve education standards.

The decision to review the guidelines was informed by the failure of some private institutions to follow the guidelines, which has led to the mushrooming of private schools in the country.

'The establishment of the new policy guidelines has reached an advance stage and it is our hope that when it is rolled out, sanity would prevail in the manner in which private institutions are emerging in the country', the acting Head of Private School Unit at the GES, Mrs Esther Happy Edjeani, told the Daily Graphic in Accra.

She explained that even though private schools were known to perform better academically than the public ones, the old policy guidelines contained flexible terms and conditions which created the conditions for unscrupulous persons to set up schools haphazardly.

Unlike public schools, she said, private schools provided more supplementary teaching and learning materials for its students, coupled with close monitoring in the area of academic work and that she noted resulted in students in such institutions doing better than their counterparts in the public sector.

Mrs Edjeani, however, indicated that since the government could not shoulder the business of education in the country alone, participation of the private sector to partner the state in that regard was welcome but stressed that such partnership must be anchored on rules and regulations.

With respect to attracting private individuals into the sector, she said the state had put in place some incentives such as tax exemption on education materials for private schools to encourage more private sector partnership.

While expressing the government's commitment to improve the standards of education in the country through such partnerships, Mrs Edjeani advised mischievous members of the public not to abuse that relationship.