NAGRAT unhappy with head count exercise

The National Association of Graduate Teachers (NAGRAT) has expressed its displeasure with the use of many state agencies to conduct head counts and inspection of certificates of staff of the Ghana Education Service (GES).

It said the exercises by such agencies “confuse teachers because they place them under avoidable stress and go on to affect academic performance”.

Documents

“For instance, teachers are required to produce a litany of documents - some of which are just irrelevant to the exercise being conducted.

“They are further made to queue for hours to have their turns with their validators who spew out all manner of threats to innocent teachers, to the extent that the BNI now perambulate schools brandishing handcuffs as if visiting a bunch of hardened criminals,” it said.

The General Secretary of NAGRAT, Mr Stanislus P. Nabome, told journalists in Accra yesterday that the number of times teachers were harassed through head counts and inspection of certificates “is one too many and we are sick and tired of it”.

Cases

He stated that cases abounded where after head counts and inspection of certificates by the Public Services Commission, the GES followed up to do the same thing. After the GES, he said, teachers were again subjected to the same exercise undetaken by the BNI, and “as if that was not enough, the Inspectorate Division of the GES took its turn to repeat the same exercise”.

As a result of the head counts and inspection of certificates, he said, a lot of contact hours were lost, which eventually led to poor performance in schools.

Disdain

He stated further that the head counts and inspections of certificates were of huge cost to the government and teachers, since a large group of people travelled from one place to another using state vehicles and fuel in conducting the exercises.

“It is expected that they are paid salaries and allowances which could have been put to better use. For their part, teachers have to travel every now and then to have themselves counted and their certificates inspected.

Costs

“Such journeys are undertaken at non-refundable costs to teachers. We find the practice unfair. If the employer wishes to count teachers, it is his/her responsibility to do so at the places of work,” Mr Nabome said.

Moreover, he said, the exercise was highly selective because while teachers were subjected to such scrutiny on a daily basis, all other public sector workers went untouched.

Mr Nabome said if there was the need to clean the payroll system “we go with it if it covers all public sector workers in the country and is properly executed. “It is unacceptable that teachers are treated as if they alone are the ‘ghosts’ using fake certificates.”

Respect

Mr Nabome, therefore, called on the Ministry of Education, the Ghana Education Service and all managers of education to treat teachers and all educational workers in the country with respect and put an end to the needless harassment.

He said the association was proposing that a single designated body be selected and made known to the staff of the GES for the conduct of any head count or inspection of certificates, adding that “besides the body mandated to carry out the exercise, it should do so only once in the academic year to save workers the unnecessary pain and stress”.