Education Minister interacts with staff
The Minister of Education, Haruna Iddrisu, has interacted with the staff of his new outfit to familiarise himself with his new environment ahead of his full assumption of office.
The brief meeting also involved a tour of some of the offices of the ministry to engage with personnel.
During the engagement, the Minister, then yet-to-be sworn in by President John Mahama, informed the staff that he was working on a date for a national dialogue on education to reset the sector for improved outcomes.
He was received by enthusiastic staff who cheered his entry in loud voices as they emerged from the offices and floors to meet the new sector minister.
“I need a date for a national conference on the future of education in Ghana to examine the state of education in Ghana to take recommendations from that committee to guide policy reforms to support President Mahama to succeed in making education from basic, secondary to tertiary, not just accessible and relevant, but guarantee quality,” he told the staff.
He also spoke on general matters regarding data in the sector and insisted that he would facilitate comprehensive research to establish how many students had benefited from the free senior high school programme so far.
Statistical validity
“But one of the very first major issues the country must interrogate is the statistical validity, I repeat it, the statistical validity of how many Ghanaians have benefited from the free senior high school,” he said.
“My research does not give me any number beyond 3.9 million students, but in the public domain and even in the records of Parliament, I hear 5.1 million. We need a validation of that record,” he added.
“But I won’t say mine is right, but whoever was working with 5.1 million probably was misleading the then President because I've looked at the numbers from 2017 to 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and I'm convinced that the number of people who have benefited from free senior high school stands at not more than 3.9 million Ghanaians.
But I need a validation of that data to begin with,” he stressed.