Parents are now taking critical role in the administration of schools, a direction the global world is moving towards, the reason the Parent Teacher Association (PTA) should be revitalised after being weakened by the implementation of the Free SHS policy.
John Dramani Mahama, flag bearer of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) who made the comments during an engagement with representatives from various teacher unions, including the Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT), the National Association of Graduate Teachers (NAGRAT), and the Coalition of Concerned Teachers, said the current trend is the reason the PTA needs to become functional again.
“Currently the Parent Teachers Association (PTA) especially at the SHS level have been rendered very weak, dysfunctional and ineffective. We believe that PTA are a vehicle for community and stakeholder participation in the work of the schools. If you look into the whole world, we are moving towards parents having a say in the administration of the school. Instead, the implementation of the Free SHS has weakened the PTAs and move them out from taking part in the work of the schools,” he stated.
He also relayed his intentions of putting up a stakeholder consultation on education to assemble the best minds there is in the sector, to dissect the challenges bedeviling education in the country and proffer solutions to them.
This comes on the back of the teeming challenges confronting the Free SHS programme regarding funding and implementation, a hurdle he has promised to address within the first 100 days in office.
“Within the first 100 days of me becoming president, we will hold a stakeholder dialogue on education. It will have as part of its focus the implementational bottlenecks of the Free SHS, but it is also going to deal with how we can improve financing and teaching and learning at the basic school level and so at that stakeholder’s engagement, NAGRAT, GNAT, parents, students, educational experts, everybody is going to be there and we are going to have a discussion on access, on equity, on affordability, and on financing our educational system,” he noted.
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