Ga South Education Directorate Is In A Shameful State

The Ga South Municipal Wing of the Ghana Education Service has the responsibility of regulating close to 700 government and private basic schools and three senior high schools.

It must be noted that the District is the heart of GES as far as regulating the various schools are concerned.

In view of this, one area where government needs to prioritize to ensure quality education is to equip the District Directorate to be able to regulate the schools in accordance with GES standards.

Unfortunately, a visit to most education directorates across the country is an eyesore and really brings to the fore our negligence and misplaced priorities as far as pursuance of quality education is concerned over the years.

The worse of the many I have visited though is the office of the Ga South Education Directorate which happens to be one of the biggest Municipal Directorates in the country

In a building that looks like an abandoned ancient museum, the mere sight of the building sums up the condition under which workers there are expected to regulated the over 600 educational institutions in their catchment area

The entire 4 room building is cladded with papers because only 3 computers are available to serve the only 20 workers I saw working there.

With staff reluctant to speak to me, I had to do a personal post-mortem of the situation and the findings were very disheartening.

You have four unit heads including the HR sharing a room of about 14ft square as an office with one computer.

The corridor has been converted into an office for about four workers who have to go through regular intrusion from visitors because it is the passage to all the offices. These are people working on classified documents without computers and yet can’t get the needed focus to work.

As if this is not bad enough, some of the workers sit under trees to work because of lack of space in the main build.

Just imagine this: if the HR shares a room with three other unit heads, where will the service personnel be?

This article seeks to draw the attention of state actors, the churches and philanthropists in the area and beyond to go to their aid because it is unfair to expect good results under such working conditions.

We can’t have quality education without creating enabling environment for the regulators to work and the truth is, the only regulators really in touch with what happens in the various schools are the MMD Directorate.

Unfortunately, even though we often hear government after government boast about building schools, we rarely hear them talk about building Education Directorates and that to me is problematic because quality cannot be achieved by bypassing the District level regulators.

Ga South Education deserve better and until that is done, quality will be affected in the classroom because it is difficult to expect a good body under a head in bad shape and that is exactly the state of the directorate: bad shape.

The only thing I found impressive and worthy of commendation was the politeness of the workers there in spite of the poor conditions and that is what pushed me to make this call on their behalf because it is natural to empathise with people who treat you with respect.

I hope it doesn’t end as just an article but paves the way for government and philanthropists to go to their aid.

This is the first of many articles because until there is a change, someone needs to speak for the voiceless

Isaac Kyei Andoh