Education Minister launches GES digital platform - Move to improve access, transparency, equity

The Minister of Education, Dr Yaw Osei Adutwum, has said the deployment of the Ghana Education Service Management Information System (GESMIS) digital platform would improve access to teaching and learning, as well as enhance transparency and equity.

At the launch and demonstration of the digital platform in Accra yesterday, the minister expressed optimism that the new move would increase teacher productivity and impact positively on the overall performance of students.

GESMIS is a comprehensive platform developed to manage data and digitise internal processes for efficient service delivery.

It is to modernise education management in Ghana and consolidate all critical GES data onto one platform for credible data management.

The platform can be accessed by both teaching and non-teaching staff, as well as students and parents.

Among the key features are a salary support ticketing system, a letter QR code verification system, students online results checking system; It also serves as an avenue for news alert and announcements.

The minister urged teachers to build on the transformation that the government had created.

"Let's create one Ghana and not a Ghana for the rich and the poor. Change must continue. We have left a footprint on the 'sand of time. If you are fiercely determined, change is possible," the minister said as he showed pictures of some of the transformed educational infrastructure.

Dr Adutwum said every child in Ghana deserved a better learning environment "and that is not negotiable".

Leveraging technology

The Director-General of GES, Dr Eric Nkansah, said the world was changing rapidly, hence, GES urgently needed to leverage technology to transform education management in pursuit of its mandate.

Thus, by implementing approved national pre-tertiary educational policies and programmes to ensure that all Ghanaian children of school-age were provided with inclusive and equitable quality formal education without discrimination.

Dr Nkansah said the digital platform would help improve the working conditions of staff, improve internal processes for efficiency across the service and improve data management using technology to ensure a strong performance management and accountability regime at all levels.

He said through this initiative, most of the newly recruited teachers were posted to regions and districts of their choice, significantly reducing language barrier issues.

"Most of the newly recruited teachers also got closer to their families and are enjoying the associated economic support.  

"We have also enhanced teaching and learning in our schools by deploying a robust application system to support the implementation of Professional Learning Communities (PLCs)," he said.

New curriculum

The Director-General said the GES had successfully implemented the Standards-Based Curriculum at the primary and junior high school (JHS) with the first batch of the JHS students now in senior high school (SHS) One to continue with the new secondary education curriculum.

"The implementation of the new SHS curriculum across the country is progressing steadily after a successful pilot in some 32 schools.

"We recorded the best WASSCE results in the last nine years, with over 60 per cent of our students obtaining A1 to C6 in all Core Subjects.

"For the 2023/2024 academic year, we enrolled a total of 505,489 form-one students into our second-cycle institutions," he said.

The Director-General said that was the highest enrolment figure for first-year students in SHSs since independence. 

Importance

He said the essence of the platform would enable GES to track students performance, monitor teacher attendance and manage school infrastructure, among other things.

The home-grown GESMIS application  is malleable to accept additional modules.