There are several types of school in Ghana. Some are state schools and some are private, and many are affiliated to a faith, such as Methodist or Seventh Day Adventist. Schools of the same type have the same coloured uniform. For instance, in Jamasi, where we visited two schools, state school pupils wore brown uniforms and those in Methodist schools wore yellow. Children in private schools wear the colour chosen by the ‘proprietor’.
The schools are arranged into year groups. First there are Kindergartens, where the children are the same age as the British Nursery and Reception Classes or Foundation 1 and 2. Next there are Primary Schools which take pupils from P1-P6, which is the same as the British Year 1 – Year 6. After P6 pupils transfer to Junior High Schools for Years 7, 8 & 9, and on completing their final year, take examinations called the Basic Examination Certificate Education (BECE) in a range of subjects. If they pass the BECE they qualify to attend a Senior High School for Year 10 to Year 13. There are also universities and colleges.
The picture is of St Augustine's Junior High School which the nearest school to where I live.
The school day starts at 7.30am when the children clean the classrooms and sweep the yard before an assembly where they do a range of things together including singing the national anthem, praying and reciting the pledge. The school day for the children ends at 1.30pm. Teachers stay for about an hour after this to mark books and prepare lessons, or for training.
For some years Ghana has been working towards providing an effective state education for all children. However, it was only in 2005 that a basic education became free to all, and compulsory. Since then numbers of pupils in schools have increased significantly. Whilst there is some very good teaching and there are some very good schools across Ghana, there are many barriers to providing a good basic education, and also to ensuring that all children attend school.
First there are problems with buildings and basic facilities. Because of the large numbers of pupils there are not enough classrooms or furniture. In one primary school I visited yesterday, seventy Year 4 pupils were squeezed into a room which used to be the headteacher’s office. To get into and out of the room pupils had to walk over the furniture and over other children. The headteacher’s office is attached to the classroom in what used to be the storeroom, and is still filled with stored items. To gain access to her office the headteacher asks children to move furniture and themselves so she can open the door.
Most schools do not have toilet facilities, although there are usually ‘urinals’ for boys and girls, and staff. When we questioned VSO about it they said children and staff cope with this by regulating what and when they eat so they do not need to use the toilet during the school day. For girls in particular this is a serious barrier to education. There is also a serious lack of resources. For instance, very few schools have electricity, let alone computers, and the textbooks and learning resources are old and out of date.
Second there are problems with inadequate numbers of teachers. The teaching profession has low status and teachers are poorly paid, so it is hard to attract people to train. Teachers are not paid for taking on additional responsibilities and headteachers are not paid more than teachers. Motivation generally is very low and many teachers do not turn up regularly or do not arrive promptly. Many classes are very large. I saw a P1 class on Monday with 101 pupils in it. Each class has one teacher and this person may not even be trained. The Ghana Education Service, which deploys staff to different schools – in the same way as British Local Authorities used to do – says that it will provide an extra teacher for a large class if the school provides an extra classroom to put half of the class in. In most cases the school is unable to do this. In order to address the problem some schools have adopted a ‘shift system’. This is where half of a large class will have the room and a teacher for half of the day, and the rest of the class will have the room and a different teacher for the second part of the day. This has definitely helped, but is being discouraged by the Ghana Education Service, probably because the pupils are not receiving their full time entitlement in school.
In order to address the lack of teachers Ghana is trying to train as many as possible. On our visit to Cape Coast University we discovered that teachers spend four years training to teach. For the first two they do not go into schools. Instead they continue learning basic skills – reading, writing and maths – and learn about teaching through role play. They then go into schools during the last two years of their training to learn to teach. It is extremely rare for somebody on a teacher training course to fail, and once in schools, teachers who do not perform well are not dismissed, but rather are moved by the Ghana Education Service to other schools. Therefore, the standards of teaching and learning in schools are variable.
Another way of addressing the lack of teachers is to take on ‘pupil teachers’ ‘national youth employees’ and volunteers. These people have had no formal training and are learning on the job. Many of them are in charge of classes. Again the quality of teaching and learning is variable as a result. A typical school with 6 classes of 70 or 80 pupils would have around 5 trained teachers and 3 or 4 untrained people, although this varies.
Another problem facing the education system is the treatment pupils sometimes receive from teachers. Some teachers do not respect pupils. Use of the cane by the headteacher is still legal in Ghana, but many teachers continue to use it anyway. Public humiliation is regularly used as a punishment, often because a child has not understood what has been taught, and pupils carry out errands for teachers during class time, such as clearing litter or even cleaning a teacher’s house.
There is also a problem with equality. Girls have historically been treated differently from boys within the Ghanaian culture, and have been expected to stay at home, clean and cook, and help with the younger children in the household – much as it was many years ago in the British culture. They have previously been denied an education. This attitude towards girls persists in many areas today, particularly in rural areas, including by some teachers who do not believe that girls are as intelligent as boys. Therefore, attendance in school by girls tends to be much lower than boys, and expectations of their performance are also lower than those of boys. Children with special needs are not treated equally by some communities, families and teachers either.
Finally there is the attitude of some of the communities and parents. There is a high drop-out rate, particularly towards the end of primary school and within the Junior High schools. When asked, parents cite school conditions, poor teaching, distance from home to school, and the need for children to work on family farms or help with domestic chores. There is also the problem where the parents cannot afford for the children to eat at school. In some areas this is being addressed by the ‘National Schools’ Feeding Programme’, where pupils are provided with free food. However, this is not nationwide and it is not known how long it will be funded.
The picture is of a class of Year 2 pupils at a village school. They had turned up to school to find the teacher had not, so they were spending the day simply sitting in their classroom doing their own thing with barely a sound. This is not unusual. Many of their peers had not come to school for a variety of reasons and these ones may well have been sent by their parents because the school is part of the schools' feeding programme. Of the schools we saw today this one was doing fairly well, because at least the other classes had a teacher. We visited a school further down the road where there were 6 classes, and only one teacher had turned up. He was teaching his own class adequately but ignoring the other children who were wandering around the yard and other classrooms. The headteacher was absent. There was one other adult in the school, but she appeared not to be a teacher and did not appear to be doing anything. The deprivation in these village schools is shocking.
It is worth noting that there is a massive ‘north-south divide’ in Ghana. The south is heavily populated while the north is very rural with far fewer people. The weather in the south is hot and humid, and the vegetation is lush, while in the north it is hot and dry, and there is poor vegetation. Whilst there are poor people in the south, there is also a degree of wealth, but in the north the people are mainly very poor subsistence farmers. This is reflected in the education system. The schools in the north are far less resourced than in the south, with overcrowding of classrooms being common, and the teaching and learning standards are lower. Many children arriving in Junior High Schools cannot yet read or write. There are fewer children attending school and the drop-out rate, particularly for girls, is very high. Those with good educations often move to the south where there are greater opportunities, thereby compounding the problem for the north.
These are the reasons VSO places its volunteers in the north of the country. Here there is a programme called TENI (Tackling Educational Needs Inclusively) which VSO is very involved with. The aim of TENI is to improve the education in 80% of schools in several areas of the north, including Jirapa. The 80% have been selected using a variety of criteria, including overcrowding, resources, teaching & learning, and results. The schools I am supporting in the Jirapa area are all schools identified for the TENI project.
My job is to support the headteachers in leading and managing their schools. Most have received very little, if any, training in being a headteacher, and many have been promoted by default. By this I mean that headteachers must be trained teachers, so there is a limited pool to select from. Often when a headteacher leaves a school the trained teacher who has been in post the longest automatically takes over, without interview. Therefore, there is a great need for high quality training in the leading and managing of people, raising teaching and learning standards and working with finance. Many of the headteachers I have met have requested training in appraisal of staff and lesson observation.
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