National Education Week opens with fair

Various agencies, departments and institutions under the Ministry of Education have held a fair to showcase and highlight policies, strategies and interventions they had put in place to improve the quality of education over the past eight years. 

The initiative formed part of the ministry’s National Education Week 2024, which allows stakeholders to come together to discuss the best ways to address challenges facing the sector and develop strategies for a sustainable future.

It also connected students, parents and educators with academic institutions, programmes, and resources, fostering informed decisions about educational opportunities and providing a platform for networking and exploration.

The week-long fair is on the theme: "The education transformation agenda; Evidence from 2017”. 

Agencies

Some of the agencies represented were the Ghana Education Service (GES), Free Senior High School (SHS) Secretariat, Ghana Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) Service, Commission for Technical and Vocational Education, The National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NaCCA) and the National Schools Inspectorate Authority.

Others were the National Service Authority, Complementary Education Agency and the Student Loan Trust Fund, National Teaching Council, Innovations for Poverty Action, Ghana Library Authority, Commission for UNESCO, Ghana Education Trust Fund and Ghana Book Development Council, among others.

They presented leaflets and mounted exhibitions that detailed the various policies and interventions they had embarked on.

Running parallel to the exhibitions were a series of panel discussions, presentations and sessions by representatives of the various education sector agencies and departments on their achievements, challenges and the way forward. 

Reforms

For instance, the Director-General of NaCCA, Prof. Yayra Dzakadzie, said his outfit had instituted a National Standardised Test aimed at diagnosing the strengths and weaknesses of learners and to assess how much support each learner would need to catch up with what they were supposed to know.

He explained that before the introduction of the reform, formative assessments were left to the teachers - a process which was not very productive so institutionalisation of the test helped track the formative assessment and the learning gains made by the learner over some time.

“The standardised test is helping us to compare, for example, a learner in P4 in Ghana, to another learner at P4, say, in the UK, in the United States of America, in Nigeria so that we have the global mapping.

And then we want to match this mapping with other learners in other countries. Apart from meeting our curriculum standards as Ghanaians, we are also using it to report globally,”  Prof. Dzakadzie explained further. 

Collaborations

The panellists stressed the significance of a collaborative approach to solving education sector-related issues, fostering innovation, improving teaching practices, and addressing diverse learning needs.

They noted that when government agencies and development partners worked together, they could share resources, ideas and strategies to enhance the quality of education.