NAGRAT endorses 3-year SHS

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27-01-08

THE National Association of Graduate Teachers (NAGRAT) has endorsed the move by the government to reduce the length of second-cycle education from four to three years.
The President of NAGRAT, Mr Kwame Alorvi, told the Daily Graphic that the content of the four-year syllabus was not different from that of the three years.
In addition, running the four-year programme would be an additional cost not only to the government but parents as well.
“Parents would have to pay fees to the fourth year and the government would also have to provide infrastructure and classrooms, among other facilities, for the schools,” he said.
The Minister of Education designate, Mr Alexander Tettey-Enyo, last Friday disclosed that one of the first things the National Democratic Congress (NDC) government was likely to do in the educational sector was the abolition of the four-year duration of the senior high school (SHS) and revert to the earlier three-year programme.
Outlining his vision for the Education Ministry to which he had been nominated as minister by President John Evans Atta Mills, Mr Tettey-Enyo, also a former acting Director-General of the Ghana Education Service, said the four-year programme had been announced by the past administration without putting in place the needed infrastructure, syllabi and textbooks to make it work.
He told the Daily Graphic that the government would initiate moves to abolish the four-year programme by first seeking an amendment to the Education Law which was passed by the Fourth Parliament last year.
Mr Alorvi noted that under the previous three-year programme there were eight periods per week for the elective subjects, adding that under the educational reform which made SHS four years, there were five periods per week for the electives.
He said another major problem for the four-year programme was the lack of electricity in some rural SHS.
He asked, “How will such schools do ICT?”
Meanwhile, the Conference of Heads of Assisted Secondary Schools (CHASS) is holding an emergency executive meeting to brainstorm on the decision of the new government to reduce the four-year SHS to three years.
“We are meeting to take a decision and in three days we will state our position,” the President of CHASS, Mr Samuel Ofori-Adjei, told the Daily Graphic in an interview.
The first batch of the four-year SHS students under the reform introduced by the government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) is expected to enter the fourth year in the 2010/2011 academic year.