Dr Yaw Adutwum, the Deputy Minister of Education, in charge of General Education, on Tuesday said government had introduced a ranking system for Senior High Schools to create a sense of urgency for school improvement.
He said the approach would be national ranking and similar schools ranking, explaining that the top schools with the same facilities and infrastructure would rank together while the so called lower schools that share similarity in areas as total enrolment and quality of students who enrol from Junior High Schools would also be ranked together.
“This year the ranking through banding procedure from one to ten, adding that band ten are the very high performing schools while band one are the low performing schools,” he added.
The Deputy Minister announced this in Accra at a meeting with heads of low performing Senior High Schools in five regions organised by the Ministry of Education and the Ghana Education Service.
The Regions are Western, Greater Accra, Volta, Central and the Eastern.
He said the Ministry had realised that some of the headmaster’s performance was below average and that most of them were not abreast with their schools’ statistics and percentage of West African Senior Secondary Certificate Examinations (WASSCE) results.
“I was shocked to ask a headmaster of a school about the performance of the school and he said he doesn’t know, how can that be possible, a whole headmaster who is not interested in knowing how well the school had performed,” he added.
Dr Adutwum said the ranking system was to help schools with the lowest ranking to learn from best practices and improve upon their performance as well as provide feedback for teachers and school administrators.
He said government as part of its secondary education reforms would introduce a professional leadership course for teachers who aspire to be headmasters.
The Deputy Minister explained that the initiative was to build the capacity of headmasters in the secondary schools to be abreast with current trends in the management of schools.
Dr Adutwum said, “if the performance of a headmaster or headmistress was not encouraging, in terms of consistent failure in the WASSCE, that headmaster or headmistress would be re-assigned”.
Source: GNA
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The current initiative by the Ministry of Education is a good effort but there is still more room for improvement. Ranking SHS schools who performed well in WASSCE and those with similar facilities under the same rank cannot be the only determinant in a schools performance. Looking at the high incidence of corruption in Ghana, my advice to the Ministry of Education is that they should think of including the moral conduct of students in schools in the list. That fact that a student is intelligent enough to pass WASSCE doesn't guarantee a morally upright citizen. There continues to be a rise in corruption among some Ghananain citizen, who may been very intelligent to pass their exams and this paveway for for them to rise to very top positions in this country. But they rather used these position rather enriched themselves whiles the ordinary Ghanaian continue to wallow in poverty. Please Dr. Matthew Opoku Prempeh include the moral conduct of students of this Senior High Schools in the new ranking. I am a concerned citizen and