A few weeks
ago, a VSO colleague asked Jane and me for some comments about education, so
that she could include them in her blog (she takes blogging a bit more
seriously than I do). Of course we had
to qualify our comments by pointing out that they are based on our work in just
one District in the Upper East Region; and that we have only had the
opportunity to visit a small number of the 115 schools in the District. So it really is a very small sample. We do also know that educational standards
are lower in rural regions than in urban centres. It is also possible that attitudes are more
traditional and less progressive in rural areas and in places where the
population is sparce – both of which apply to Zebilla. Nevertheless, we do think that a lot of our
experience is likely to be common at least to the more rural parts of the
country. This is what we sent her:
“Question 1
– What’s wrong with education in Ghana?
Ghana offers
universal, free basic education to all its citizens and deserves huge praise
for this – it is more than many countries manage. (Basic education means up to BECE – very
roughly the equivalent of GCSE.)
Nevertheless, the short answer to this question is “almost everything”.
·
Many
children do not even go to school.
o
Paul
estimates that in Bawku West District 20% of all children do not attend school
at all.
o
Fewer
than 50% of children take the BECE exam, so leave school with no recognised
qualification.
o
Only
20 - 25% attend Senior High School.
o
A
good-news story is that in kindergarten and primary school, roughly 50% of
pupils are girls. However, there is less
gender equality in the higher classes – less than 45% of the pupils who take
BECE are girls, and only 40% of pupils at Senior High School are girls.
·
The
schools are over-crowded and poorly equipped.
o
Many
kindergarten and primary classes have 50 – 70 children (and some have over 100)
in classrooms which would be comfortable for 40.
o
In
some schools, classes take place under trees (to give some protection from the
powerful sun) because there are not enough classrooms.
o
About
a third of the schools in our district have inadequate toilet facilities. Most have no running water (water is brought
in buckets from local boreholes), and no electricity.
o
Most
classrooms only have a blackboard – compared to a UK classroom with its bright
displays, projector, smartboard etc, here there is no high-tech equipment at
all, there are no pictures on the walls, no books, no toys for the youngest
pupils or learning materials beyond, sometimes (and certainly not universally)
the most basic (eg stones or bottle tops for counting).
o
Almost
all schools are short of textbooks.
Recently government has provided more English, maths, science and ICT
textbooks but these have not been enough even for 1 between 2 in most schools,
and considerably less than this in some.
o
Apart
from textbooks, there are almost no other books at all anywhere in schools.
o
Recently
the government has been able to provide laptops for some (but not all) Junior High
Schools – typically there will be one computer for 4 to 5 pupils, with software
such as Word 2003, Excel 2003.
·
There
are not enough teachers.
o
Another
reason why classes are so over-crowded is that there are not enough teachers.
o
Fewer
than half the teachers in Bawku West District are fully trained; most of the
others are only qualified to the equivalent of A-level.
o
Teaching
is not well paid – many teachers also have other work, which means that even if
they are enthusiastic and committed they have to devote some of their energy to
another job.
o
Teachers
have very few resources – in the main they don’t have access to the internet to
find up-to-date teaching materials and ideas for stimulating lessons, and they
have to improvise equipment (for example making measuring cylinders out of old
plastic bottles in science).
o
Teachers
are not well respected in the community and even though some teachers are
enthusiastic and committed, there is a serious lack of professionalism overall.
·
There
is very limited provision for children with disabilities.
o
There
are special schools for deaf and blind children but these are often a long way
from where the children live, so they have to board away from their families
with no chance of a trip home or a visit from their parents. Many deaf and blind children don’t go to
school at all.
o
There
are a few day schools for children with other disabilities, but most of the
children who would benefit from these live too far away to be able to attend.
o
Although
it is Ghana’s policy to include children with “mild to moderate disabilities”
in mainstream schools, in practice the schools are not equipped to cope with
them and the teachers are not adequately trained (and couldn’t give them the
attention they need in such large classes).
There are no classroom assistants to help.
Question 2 –
What does this have to do with poverty?
·
The
lack of school buildings, textbooks, and learning materials clearly reflects
Ghana’s relative lack of money as a nation.
·
Likewise
the low rate of pay for teachers, the shortage of teachers, the lack of
infrastructure for children with disabilities etc.
·
Even
though education is “free”, families still have to provide quite a lot for
their children at school (uniform, exercise books, pens etc) and whilst the
sums involved are small by UK standards, they are often more than families here
can afford. Most families are short of
money most of the time.
·
But
on top of that, Ghana’s population is largely uneducated and there isn’t a
history or tradition of valuing education, or seeing schooling as one of the
highest priorities for a family’s children.
This is more a case of “educational poverty” than simply being short of
money.
·
At
the moment, Ghana’s economy is not strong enough for people to see a good
education leading through to a well-paid job.
Question 3 –
What do you think the solutions are?
There are no
quick or easy solutions to these problems.
Obviously, Ghana needs a lot more money to be able to run a better
education system, and so it needs to grow its economy to the point where it can
afford this. Ghana also needs to learn
from other countries, both by receiving help from volunteers like us, and also
by sending its own teachers to see what education is like in more developed
countries. We know of some teachers and
head teachers who have been to the UK on educational visits, and some of them
come back inspired to do things differently and can make real improvements in
their schools. Of course, it’s a huge
challenge to improve the education system of a whole nation – but every little
helps. Ghana is a very positive country
with what seems to be a soundly-based democracy, so there is hope that they can
sustain their country as the long, slow process of development continues. Without ongoing development support from
countries like the UK, progress will be much more uncertain and inevitably
slower.
Question 4 –
How do the projects we are working on help?
Jane’s work
is specifically about children with special needs – disabilities of various
types. Ghana has good policies in this
area but the implementation is almost non-existent and awareness of the
policies is low. Many families with a
disabled child are ashamed and stigmatized, and they keep the child out of the
public view. Any work that raises
awareness, overcomes stigma, and helps individual children is obviously
valuable and can be absolutely life-transforming for a small number – but it is
only a drop in an ocean. The volunteer
who was working here last year probably achieved that sort of change for two or
three children. If I can do the same I
will be very proud, but it won’t be enough.
Paul’s work
is about the organization and management of education. Ultimately this is about ensuring that as
much as possible is achieved with the resources available, and that there are
robust and realistic plans for improvement in the future. There is plenty to achieve in this area and
as a volunteer I can see that there is scope for me to help the Ghana Education
Service provide a better education for thousands of children just in this
District. At times the task does seem
daunting – but there is lots of scope to make a real and lasting difference.”
That’s the
end of our reply. It will be interesting
to see if any of it eventually appears in the ether.
Over the
past month some work I have been doing on the age of school pupils has been
slowly maturing. It isn’t complete yet
but the emerging trends are now clear I think, and it isn’t exactly what I was
expecting. The main points are:
·
It
seems that between 80% and 90% of all children aged 3 – 19 are enrolled in
“basic school”. I was expecting a figure
in the range 50% - 60%, so this is quite a surprise; the main reason for this
is that I had misunderstood the child population figures for Bawku West
District. “Basic school”, you will
recall, is that part of Ghana’s education which is “universal, compulsory and
free”. It is aimed at children aged 4 –
14, and culminates in the BECE exam (which is a bit like GCSE and is taken at
the end of the third year in Junior High School, in theory at age 14);
·
There
is no under-representation of girls in the system except that:
o
Only
45% of the pupils in JHS3 (the pupils who sit the BECE exam) are girls; and
o
There
are fewer girls than boys aged 17, 18 and 19 in basic school (and there are
also fewer girls than boys in Senior High School, which is intended for pupils
aged 15 to 17 – approximately 40% of SHS pupils are girls);
·
Most
of the children entering education in KG1 (over 80%) are the “correct” age – 4
or 5. But in the subsequent Primary
School classes the proportion of pupils who are the correct age gets smaller
and smaller – 50% in Primary 3 (age 8 – 9 in theory) and 30% in Primary 6 (age
11 – 12 in theory);
·
At
age 12 – 13, when in theory pupils should have entered Junior High School,
fewer than 5% have actually done so, and a few percent are still in
Kindergarten!;
·
There
are substantial numbers of pupils aged 15 – 19 (and older) still in Primary
School, and very large proportions of pupils aged over 14 still in Junior High
School.
I’m still
making up my mind what I think of this.
On the one hand, I am very encouraged to find a larger proportion of
children attending school than I previously thought. Eighty to ninety percent enrolment still
means that one or two children in every ten are missing out on education, but to
be honest I think any developing country would be very proud of those figures.
On the other
hand, it’s clear that a lot of young people are only receiving a very
rudimentary education if they never progress beyond Primary School. Also, I suspect that pupils of genuine
Primary School age suffer a significant educational detriment as a result of
there being large numbers of much older children in their classes; to say
nothing of gaining quite the wrong expectations about the education they should
be receiving when they are 15 – 19.
I still
haven’t got to the bottom of why there are so many pupils who are “too old” for
their class. If they enter school at the
right age, why don’t they progress? It
is part of the system here that a pupil only progresses to the next class if
he/she has reached an adequate standard in the previous class. However the data I have seen on this suggests
that only small numbers of pupils repeat a year.
I do also
need to say a couple of words of caution about the data.
The honest
truth is that very few people in Ghana know their actual date of birth. Birthdays are not celebrated. There doesn’t seem to be a meaningful process
for registering births, so there is a lack of official records, and date of
birth doesn’t seem to be regarded as an important piece of information. Consequently, when parents are asked for
their child’s date of birth (which, will either be when they come to register
their child for a Health Insurance Card, or when they first enrol at school),
they and the official who needs the information will “agree” on a
realistic-seeming date. That will then
become the child’s official date of birth and birthday. There does seem to be a need for consistency
in official dates of birth, and problems arise when a person discovers that
their parents “agreed” one date for school enrolment and a different one for the
health insurance card. First note of
caution: the dates of birth quoted might be wrong.
I’m also not
entirely convinced that all head teachers, who are the source of my data, have
deployed the desirable degree of thoroughness in supplying it. Some have recorded that the year of birth
(which is what I asked for) is unknown in up to a third of cases; others seem
to know them all. Some appear to have
worked out that all the children in, say, P1, should have been born in 2007 or
2008 and recorded them all in those years; others report that they have P1
children born in every year between 2000 and 2010. It’s possible that all these data are totally
accurate, but they seem strangely inconsistent to me and I’m considering trying
to get a look at some registers to check up on the more unlikely-looking ones! Second note of caution: I might be working
with a high proportion of garbage data.
I’ll post
more information about this if anything meaningful emerges during the rest of
my placement. I’m hoping to encourage
the Ghana Education Service to form an opinion about whether they are happy
with the current situation, and if not, what they think they can do about
it. It’s an interesting question whether
they are aware of it already, and the answer is “yes and no”. When I report to senior GES people that I
have discovered there are lots of pupils in Primary School who are way too old
to be there, they reply that of course they know that already and they launch
straight into explanations of why it happens and factors that justify it (or
make it inevitable). But they don’t have
a quantified understanding of the phenomenon and it seems to be a surprise that
the proportions of over-age pupils are as high as my figures indicate, or that
the numbers of really old pupils (19+) who are still in Primary School really
are that big.
There are two
things that we didn’t write in our reply, and which aren’t easy to put into
words without sounding seriously negative and politically incorrect.
The first is
that the whole set of culture and attitudes surrounding children just isn’t
conducive to a decent, successful education system. The teachers are part of Ghana’s culture and
seem to have these cultural attitudes. To
be brutally honest, as long as that continues, education is going to be
poor. The second is that compared to the
UK, many teachers here almost totally lack what we would regard as professionalism.
Expanding on
the first of these points, I’d say that it would be easy for a casual observer
to think that Ghanaian children enjoy the idyllic childhood which people of my
age perhaps think we used to have in the UK and have lost. Ghana is a safe place for children. They get up in the morning and they are free
to be children all day until they go to bed.
There is no molly-coddling of any sort, the weather is splendid
virtually all the time, there is nearly no traffic, nobody seems to have heard
of or worry about paedophiles, there are no gun or machete-wielding madmen who massacre
children and teachers in school, there’s no TV or computer games to stop them
from playing out (though TV is arriving…).
Parents don’t generally both work, so there is no system of farming
children out to child-minders; and working parents generally haven’t commuted
more than a mile or so to their place of work, so they can be got hold of
quickly if needed (though quite a lot of parents work a long way away and are
absent during the week or sometimes for longer). And in the community, the extended family
system and the fact that there is very little population mobility means that
wherever a child is, even one who can barely toddle, there will be an adult who
knows roughly who they are and where they belong. What could be more wholesome?
All the above
is true. But the other side of the coin
is that this is a world where family planning isn’t much more than a
theoretical concept (and one that many people haven’t heard of); where fathers
take very little notice of their children and mothers don’t seem to have either
the time or the inclination to nurture them; where there are more polygamous
marriages than monogamous ones (which I think helps fuel Ghana’s rate of
population increase at over 2.5%); where children are generally regarded
positively in the sense of being a useful asset as a worker (and male children
as someone to inherit the estate); where child labour is rife (absolutely huge
numbers of children are engaged in economic activities of some sort, even if it
is “only” selling at the market); where male offspring are valued more highly
than female; where, apparently, many mothers don’t cook on market days (every
third day in Zebilla) so the children go hungry that day; where laws about
physical punishment are ignored by most people, where nobody would dream of
reporting someone to the police for mercilessly beating their offspring (or
pupil), and where the police don’t do anything either to enforce the law
generally or in response to the non-existent complaints… and I could go on.
In the cultural
pecking order, children are at the bottom.
In certain circumstances they come below the family’s animals. They should be seen and not heard, they must
do what they are told or face a beating, they are required to “respect” adults
to the extent that, for example, when we show up at school carrying any sort of
bag there is a crowd of children offering to carry it for us (and the general
rule is that one of them will be taken up on the offer). It isn’t a country where I could say that
children are loved, or respected, or nurtured, or particularly well cared-for. From my own observations, they certainly
aren’t seen as the family’s and the society’s most valuable treasures.
This
translates into a total lack of what a UK teacher would recognise as child-centred
education. At school, children are
punished for their misdoings but not praised for their achievements. They are expected to make the best of a
standard “chalk and talk” style of teaching with no account taken of their
individual learning style or learning needs.
It is difficult for them to tell their teacher that they don’t
understand something, as it risks being taken either as an admission of
stupidity (meaning that they are not worth another attempt at explanation) or
as implied criticism of the teacher – which would display a serious lack of respect.. Nobody asks whether the children are happy at
school, or like school, or would do better if school was different – these are
thoughts that seem totally alien to the culture here. Of course, if they were asked, the children would say
that they like school just the way it is – because to say anything different
would be to imply criticism of their elders and betters and thus highly
disrespectful.
Expanding on
teacher professionalism, obviously there’s a bit of an overlap with what I have
written above, but it goes further. Many
teachers consider themselves to be underpaid and under-valued. Consequently they seem to work
grudgingly. They don’t seem to feel
under any particular pressure to turn up at school on time or every day; when
they have turned up, they don’t seem necessarily inclined to do any teaching;
and if they do teach, they don’t seem to want to plan their lessons well or
evaluate the outcome, or ask themselves whether they are doing a good enough
job, how they could do better, how they could contribute to a better
educational outcome for their pupils.
They see nothing wrong with carrying out other business activities
during school hours, and if some personal matter comes up (the most usual being
a family funeral – there are loads of these because families are so extended)
then it automatically takes precedence over school. The same malaise affects head teachers and
not unreasonably, the teachers follow the head teachers’ lead (I have found a
clear statistical correlation between attendance levels of teachers and the
attendance rate or their head teacher).
Now, there
are conscientious teachers and head teachers in Ghana and we have met some, and
it is wrong to tar them all with this brush, or to paint them all the same
shade of abysmal. It is also fair to
point out that the standard of teacher training in Ghana seems to be quite poor,
with trainee teachers emerging from college with a pretty inadequate understanding
of what the job should be all about. And
it is fair to accuse the Ghana Education Service, which is the body that is in
charge of the delivery of education, in compliance with the policies set down
by the Ministry of Education, of having no vision and no deep understanding of
education.
The GES is
also guilty of treating teachers in a highly peremptory fashion. Their record of paying teachers on time is
not good (though, to be fair, this is perhaps more of a Government of Ghana
problem than GES). But another example
is that, over the Easter holidays, the GES in our district redeployed some 75
teachers - almost 10% of all teachers – to different schools in response to a
directive from Headquarters. There was
no forewarning or consultation, no explanation of why the moves were needed, no
asking for volunteers, and not even individual communication with the teachers
affected. All that happened was that a
list of teacher deployments was put on the notice-board outside the GES office,
and teachers were expected to know miraculously that it was there and consult
it. Nobody in the management here sees
anything wrong with that – but obviously to western eyes it’s far from
satisfactory.
Ghana also
seems to suffer from not knowing what good education looks like, and thus having
no meaningful yardstick against which to measure its own achievements. It lacks awareness of its own shortcomings
and it lacks the inclination to search for them in order to improve.
So there are
reasons to explain why teaching here is not as good as it needs to be –
unfortunately those excuses don’t make the teaching any better.
In summary,
Ghana’s children don’t experience any education during a lot of the time they
spend at school; when they are being taught, it’s in an unimaginative way
which, for example, emphasises rote learning of facts rather than the
acquisition of problem-solving skills (though even then, it manages to neglect
the facts that they should learn (times tables and number bonds to 10 to quote
a couple of obvious ones)); and there is nothing in their experience of
education which could be expected to fire them with enthusiasm or a desire to
learn, or find out where their potential lies and how to fulfill it, or have
confidence in their ability to achieve great things.
Perhaps the last
word, though, should be that even the poor education on offer in Ghana is much,
much better than nothing. Ghana is on
the journey, and there are signs of progress, particularly in terms of
enrolment levels and female participation in education. The next generation will mainly have parents
who went to school, which might make a big difference. Ghana needs our ongoing encouragement and
support as they continue along the road.
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