A bit about education in Ghana

I'm sure you were wondering when I might get round to writing about education in Ghana, given that that’s what my volunteer placement is about.  We have been in Zebilla for almost 5 months now, and we have learnt a lot.  We sense, though, that there is much more that we don’t yet know.  So here is a first installment.

I’ve no doubt that there are some very well-educated people in Ghana.  Here at the Ghana Education Service, we work alongside people who have been teachers and head-teachers, as well as accountants, auditors and a few other professionals.  Some of these have been to university, but that’s a privilege here which relatively few enjoy; none of them has a higher degree.  I’d say that they are among the most highly educated people in the District.  They are quite a bit less well educated than we are.

They know very little about the UK or the historical and cultural things that we take for granted etc (but then, we knew very little about Ghana and Africa, and their history and culture before we came here).  One exception is the UK Premier League – this is followed closely in Ghana and there are avid followers of Chelsea, Manchester United and other major football clubs; people here (not necessarily the staff in the office) could talk football down the pub with the best of the British!  If you go a bit more high-brow, though, you draw a complete blank – in the UK there’s a reasonable chance that someone could tell you that Handel’s Water Music was composed by Handel, or that the Mona Lisa was a famous picture of a woman.  Here, there’s no chance at all.

They’re reasonably numerate – at least, they are reasonably good at the mechanics of being numerate; unfortunately they are really poor at examining data and drawing logical conclusions. 

Their English is pretty good (remember I’m talking here about the educated staff at the office – the typists and clerical staff are less fluent in English and the drivers, handymen, labourers etc really only know a few phrases).  They’re not terribly literate.  None of them reads as a hobby and there are very few books anywhere.  There is a building in Zebilla which is called the public library but we have never seen it open and we’ve been told that the books it contains are all damaged.    The whole culture here relies much less than ours on the written word – it’s something that dawns on you slowly as you live here that compared to the UK you don’t see much writing anywhere (and I haven’t seen a single thing written in a Ghanaian language).  Of course they need to read at work, but they read slowly and they find any document longer than a page or two quite a challenge. 

They don’t (and can’t) write stylish English.  They have to write reports of visits to school etc, and what they produce is mainly just about grammatical but stilted, and there is a limited stock of standard phrases and generalisations which is well used.  You have to remember that English isn’t their first language and isn’t what they speak in their home context or even for the majority of the time at work – and I’m not sure people in the UK would perform very much better if they had to produce written work in French.  (I’m going to blog about Ghanaian English at some point.)  Most also have rather child-like handwriting.  Only the younger ones have any degree of computer literacy and nobody in the office types their own documents.

They are intelligent and articulate, and they like discussing and arguing, particularly about politics – and they seem genuinely well-informed about politics in their own country and their history since independence.  The arguing and discussing seems to be more of a bloke activity – there are educated women at the office but from what I have seen they tend not to join in these discussions.

In a way which is rather difficult to pin down, they don’t seem to be very creative.  There seems to be a strong national tendency to see obstacles (referred to here as “challenges” – I think some NGO management consultant somewhere has a lot to answer for!) and they are not good at (or even interested in) thinking of ways round them.  I sometimes wonder whether this links somehow with religion – God’s support is invoked much more frequently than we’re used to, and genuinely (not in the mode of “oh, for God’s sake!”); and God is thanked for all sorts of things.  It’s as if Ghanaians feel themselves to be rather passive occupants of their land, at prey to greater forces and powerless to take control – rather the opposite of the UK, where there is much more of a sense of “if you don’t like the way it is, set about changing it”.  I realise that this observation would fit better in a blog about culture rather than education.    

And every now and then they astonish us with some cultural opinion or belief that still quite takes our breath away.  Take witches – there is no persuading people in Ghana (of any and all religious persuasions) that witches are a figment of the imagination!  And don’t think that that doesn’t matter.  A colleague of ours, working in special needs education, has recently posted on Facebook a striking photo of a young girl with piercing blue eyes.  A Ghanaian friend took one look and said, “She will soon be declared to be a witch”.  This will make her an outcast and will totally wreck her life.  About 20 miles from Zebilla (at Gambaga, of Gambaga Escarpment fame (The Lost World)…) there is a witches’ sanctuary – a village where women who have been declared as witches live apart from the rest of society.  There have been a few well-meaning attempts to get this place closed down in the last 20 years, but each time the women themselves resist in panic – if their sanctuary was closed, they would have nowhere to live and would remain as outcasts at large until they starved or met with an untimely end. 

I don’t actually think that it is the women’s resistance that has thwarted the efforts to close the encampment – local (and national) feelings about witches are nowhere near the point where that could happen and, to the extent that modern education should eradicate out-moded superstitions, Ghana is still near the start of the journey, and, at least as far as the north of the country is concerned, there is little sign that the traditional leadership in the communities is yet ready to set off for real.    

Working alongside educated Ghanaians is definitely an experience that makes you value your British education - even if up to now you’d fallen for the constant Government propaganda that the UK’s education system is substandard (which I hadn’t – so let’s not go there).

Ghana achieved independence from Britain in 1957, and was the first colony to do so.  I don’t know why Ghana was first - I have heard it suggested that Kwame Nkrumah, an energetic, charismatic and influential Ghanaian pan-African liberationist (who became Ghana’s first leader) played a key role, and through his agitations changed the mindset of the British Government from “one day in the semi-distant future it will probably be a good idea to let our colonies become independent” to “independence for our colonies is something we should be actively working towards right now”.

Britain had set up education for the natives during the colonial period, and missionaries had also set up schools.  I haven’t researched exactly what they did, when it started, how much and how widespread it was, how effective it was etc.  A substantial document, “the Accelerated Development Plan for Education” was produced in 1951 at a point when independence was beginning to look like a realistic prospect.  It was followed after independence by the 1961 Education Act.  Ghana has had a Ministry of Education right from the start.  It has produced a steady flow of such documents; most recently, Ghana passed another Education Act in 2008. 

The 1951 Plan’s main aim seems to have been the rapid expansion of primary and secondary education in Ghana, based on 10 years of “basic education” (6 years primary, 4 years middle-school).  I think this can be taken to mean that education wasn’t particularly widespread up to that point; and I have read (in Ghana’s School Management Committee Handbook produced in October 2012) that it “led to some erosion of the standard of education at both levels and thus created the phenomenon of unemployed school leavers”.  One of the accountants here told us that previously it had been British policy not to educate the people in the north of Ghana, so that they would constitute a ready resource of manual labour; and that subsequent reforms have recognized the north as having been disadvantaged, and responded by making education at Senior High School level free for the Upper East, Upper West and Northern Regions.  I don’t know how true the first part of this is, but it does seem to be the case that Senior High School is “fee free” in the north but not in the south.

The 1961 Act made education compulsory; added a further level of education – secondary – though only primary and middle-school education was “fee-free”; and had as a goal to produce citizens who would “use their potentials and powers of science and technology to transform the environment to the benefit of themselves and the nation at large” (another quote from the SMC Handbook).  Under this Act, Government took over control and management of all schools – and I think the Ghana Education Service, the body Jane and I are working for, came into being at this point, to be in charge of the delivery of education (policy remaining the responsibility of the Ministry of Education). 

The idea that Ghana needed to become a technologically advanced country was a major part of Nkrumah’s vision for the new country so it is no surprise that a new Education Act was one of his government’s early actions, or to see this link between education and economic aspirations for the nation in his approach to education.  I’m going to come back to the idea of “free education” – like many things said by politicians, it doesn’t seem quite to mean what it ought to.

The 2008 Act makes basic education – now comprising 2 years of kindergarten, 6 years of primary education and 3 years of “junior high school” - “free, compulsory and universal” (which they already were, of course – and the 1961 Act had already stated that parents who do not send their children/wards to school are liable to be fined, though I doubt that any were under either Act).  Children enter kindergarten at age 4, and thus, progressing at the rate of one class per year, should complete their “basic education” at age 15.  I’ll tell you later that few do so on this timescale.  There is a school-leaving exam called BECE – the Basic Education Certificate Examination; more about this later.

At the time of the 2008 Act, the main planks of Ghana’s education policy/strategy were to increase access and participation; to improve the quality of teaching and learning; and to improve efficiency in management.  The next version (in 2010) added back an emphasis on science and technology and restated the policy objective that education should support the country’s economic development. 

Most of this felt reasonably comfortable and familiar to me as I was piecing it together.  I had a sense that the education system shares some common roots with what I experienced in from the UK (admittedly a while ago).  The first document I was given to read was the “School Management Handbook”, and having been a school governor I found it all very familiar (and quite well written for an audience starting with quite limited ideas about education).  When I got hold of the 2005-2013 Education Strategic Plan, and its successor the 2010-2020 Education Strategic Plan I had quite a shock – they were documents that could easily have come out of the UK Civil Service (though they were rather shorter…).   They include a policy statement that Ghana wishes to allow a private sector in education to flourish, on the grounds that this will reduce the cost of education to the Government; a decision to distance Government further from the delivery of education by devolving the role of the GES to the Metropolitan/Municipal/District Assemblies (whilst retaining control of policy); and an intention to create a body which looks suspiciously like OFSTED, and some sort of Curriculum Authority.  I haven’t seen any evidence of energetic efforts to turn those policies into reality though. 

Another policy in common with the UK is that of including pupils with mild-to-moderate special needs in mainstream schools.  Our experience of this is that it is in the earliest stages of realisation.

The academic year starts in September, like the UK.  Schools open for 3 terms per year – with holidays at Christmas (for 3 weeks) and Easter (3 or 4 weeks).  They have formal exams at the end of each term; and the BECE (and the West African Senior School Certificate Examinations, equivalent of A-levels or baccalaureate) happen in June.        

So, there you have it – a school system not unlike that of the UK (though perhaps not yet incorporating our latest innovations).  Superficially the main differences are that primary education lasts until age 12; consequently the JHS (“middle school”) only lasts 3 years.  After that, for pupils who do well enough in BECE, come 3 years in the equivalent of a sixth-form, in separate Senior High Schools (Zebilla’s is actually a “Senior High and Technical School” though I’m not sure that this makes a big difference to the curriculum).  And there is tertiary education which includes universities, teacher-training colleges and a couple of other flavours of vocational education.

In Bawku West District, which is a dispersed rural community with one large town (Zebilla) and a lot of villages, this translates into 67 state schools which are combined kindergarten and primary schools; 41 Junior High Schools, mostly on the same site as a KG/Primary but with a separate head teacher; and 2 Senior High Schools, with a third one under consideration.  Some of the village schools are quite small.  I have been working recently in two schools in Zebilla – one Junior High School with about 150 pupils, and one KG/Primary with 650 pupils (which feels pretty big).  The number of schools has risen quite rapidly in recent years – in 2008 there were around 50 KG/Primaries and only 14 JHSs (and there were only 28 as recently as 2011/12). 

There are also 9 private KGs and 7 private primary schools – and there are two small private SHSs.  About a dozen of the state KG/primary schools, and some of the private ones, have names which imply an allegiance to one or other Christian sect, predominantly Catholic and Anglican.  One of these has a head teacher called “Brother Godfrey” but I haven’t yet detected what the Christian affiliation means in practice there or in the others.  Four schools (two pairs of KG/P and JHS) have what appears to be a Muslim affiliation – one pair call themselves “Islamic” schools and the other “English/Arabic” schools (though they don’t teach Arabic in the JHS, and the head teacher there is a Christian pastor) – these schools close early on a Friday to accommodate Muslim prayers. 

The Senior High Schools cater for boarders as well as day pupils because it isn’t a practical proposition to commute daily from the outlying villages; and also, there are pupils from outside the district (and SHS pupils from Zebilla in schools as far afield as Bolgatanga, Tamale, Kumasi and even Accra).  There are no tertiary education institutions in Bawku West (or in the Upper East Region, I think) but there is a teacher training college in Navrongo (Upper West), which is only a couple of hours away. 

There are also no special schools.  There is a day school for children with multiple physical and learning difficulties in Bolgatanga.  The nearest school for the deaf is just outside Bolgatanga, and there is another in Tamale (5 hours away).  For the blind, there is a special school in Tamale and another in Wa (which you can’t get to in a day by public transport).  Special schools in Ghana are generally boarding institutions so the distance only matters in terms of family visits during term-time, and travel at the start and end of term.

In the next installment I’m going to tell you more about BECE and a range of associated things.  Jane’s blog will tell you something about what the schools are actually like, including photos, so I’m probably not going to duplicate that.  But before then, let’s return to “fee-free”.

As I said, there are private schools in Zebilla which charge fees – but I don’t know how much.  I was depressed to discover this as I harbour a personal conviction that private education in the UK is a divisive influence which propagates privilege and deprives the state sector of the engagement of a lot of interested and capable parents whose energies could be mobilized for the common good; and that the private sector doesn’t produce better educated people (which is different from saying that they don’t achieve higher GCSE and A-level grades).  However that’s probably another place not to go.   I don’t think the private schools here can be charging a huge amount of money because, as I’ve said exhaustively in other blogs, there isn’t that much money about.  I’m saddened to say that I can see evidence that they perform better than the state offering.

The state schools don’t charge a fee.  However, they aren’t entirely free.  Children have to have a uniform; pupils/parents have to provide exercise books, pens etc; we’ve recently discovered that some schools arrange extra lessons, ostensibly because they can’t get through the syllabus otherwise; and at Christmas we found children paying for the paper on which to write their end of term exams.  None of these items is particularly expensive in itself – the uniform costs about £15 (you buy the material and get a local seamstress/tailor to make it up), extra classes are less than £5 and exercise books cost as little as 20p.  But this is a country where a quarter of the population lives on less than $1 a day (that was less than 70p last time I looked), and at the margins these small costs remain an obstacle to education for many children.  This is a genuine dilemma for the Government.  Education – 75% of whose costs are the salaries of teachers (and teachers here aren’t well paid) is the biggest item of Government expenditure, money is in short supply, and there is strong international pressure (from the World Bank, the IMF etc) on developing countries to reduce their public expenditure.

If what I have typed so far leaves you thinking that education in Ghana is essentially similar to education in the UK, I think that the next installment will suggest that really it isn’t - and I’ll try to show you how and why.

 PS - here are a couple of additions to my last blog.

I meant to mention that all Ghanaians have the same hair - black and wiry, and not prone to growing more than about 15 - 20 cms in length.  Chlidren at school, of both sexes, nearly all adult males and quite a lot of adult females, have their hair very close-cropped.  Just a very few unkempt males allow their hair to grow "bushy"; it's a visible sign of not taking sufficient care of yourself and is frowned upon.  I've never seen a woman with untidy hair; women spend money on braids, and many wear wigs.

Referring to "matrilineal inheritance", I meant to make the obvious point that this solves all problems of inheritance claims from illegitimate offspring of the father, whilst totally failing to deal with illegitimate offspring of the mother.  As far as I can see in Ghana, there is little if any social pressure on men to be faithful to their wives; but there is extremely strong social pressure on women not to be unfaithful.