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The Institute for Education Studies (IFEST) would like to extend its warm seasonal greetings to the people of Ghana and especially those in the education sector. We can testify that 2020 has been a difficult year for all of us, especially those in the education sector, due to the arrival of Covid-19.
The impact of this pandemic on the education sector is enormous. Globally, the world bank has estimated in its 2020 review that the effect of Covid-19 on education could be felt for decades to come. They reiterate the fact that the impact transcends learning loss, which is a short-term problem, to a longer-term problem of diminishing economic opportunities. Being part of a region (Sub-Saharan Africa) with a low level of learning, the administrator of our education system should be busy thinking of concrete measures to minimize the effects in the coming year.
IFEST, believes that the huge investments in the education sector should be reflected in our overall economic growth of the country, therefore, immediate measures must be taken to mitigate the impact of this pandemic on our education.
In Ghana, an estimated 10 million students had to stay home due to the pandemic. The Ministry of Education and the Ghana Education Service, in that short period, were able to implement online and virtual teaching platforms aimed at ensuring continuity in learning. Although well intentioned, interim measures have exposed the shortcomings of our educational system in terms of integrating technology into the teaching and learning process. It also revealed discrepancies in the training of our teachers when preparing them to use 21S t ICT tools of the XXI century in their teaching and learning. For us, there has been a widening of the inequality gap leaving the marginalized and less privileged behind, while the wealthy were able to access some of these platforms and therefore had some form of continuity in their education.
As an educational policy and research institute, we firmly believe that educational policies should not make the situation worse for any of the stakeholders; at best, they should address the necessary challenge and improve the status quo. Hence, our analysis of the challenges documented in our specific research called “Education in the middle of a pandemic” Suggest two policy directions for education administrators in the coming year.
- Policy Initiative 1: Development of ICT infrastructure in rural / disadvantaged areas
Our research revealed that almost 95% of students in areas of Ghana classified as rural or disadvantaged did not benefit from interventions implemented by the Ministry of Education. This was attributed to several factors such as the lack of ICT infrastructure in most of these communities, a higher level of digital divide, poor parental supervision, and inability to access virtual learning due to the level of poverty in these areas that makes it difficult to families to own televisions. To address these challenges and ensure that the children of these communities also benefit from any type of technological intervention in the not too distant future, we propose that there should be a deliberate development of ICT Infrastructure in these areas. By this, we do not mean the practice of putting two or three computers in these schools where in some cases they do not have access to electricity. We advocate for the construction of cutting-edge ICT centers for a group of schools within an area of influence. These centers will serve as technological learning centers for students in that group. Schools can visit these centers to improve their knowledge of ICT. If we switch to online learning, a well-coordinated schedule can be prepared to ensure that students access these online platforms just like their colleagues in urban centers. In this way, we will be able to achieve digital domain competence for all schoolchildren in the country and not just the privileged ones.
- Policy Initiative 2: Strengthening the capacity of teachers in educational technology
Another challenge observed while tracking the impact of the pandemic on our education system was the adequate knowledge of teachers at EdTech. This encompasses all levels of our education. In fact, in some tertiary institutions, tutors and teachers had to retrain to be able to engage their students online.
Therefore, we propose to the Ghana Ministry and Education Service to design a series of teacher training programs at the elementary and secondary school level to update their knowledge of how to integrate educational technology into their teaching. We also wish to point out that, during their training programs, all teachers must have various digital devices used for teaching.
The National Teaching Council may decide to award specific points to in-service teachers as part of their portfolio building. We also call for an immediate review of all ICT training programs offered to student-teachers in our tertiary institutions. This is to ensure that such courses are up to date with current trends in EdTech.
In conclusion, while we await the final decision of the government on the reopening of schools, we would like to reiterate our position on the proposal for the automatic promotion of students. We firmly believe that since the implementation of the new curriculum has not run its full course, a readjustment of the academic calendar to ensure that students spend at least 4 weeks in their current classes so that their teachers can summarize what they all who need to know at that level before moving on to the next level will be very beneficial to students.
These class teachers can use the period to organize rapid assessments to identify where their students are and help them catch up before moving to the next level. Particularly at a time when the The overall focus is on enhanced assessment to design catch-up interventions, minimize learning losses by adapt teaching to the new context and maximizing contact time, any decision to use automatic promotion:
- put great pressure on teachers and students
- defeat the purpose of the national assessment framework (likely to start in 2021)
- Make the achievement of specific competencies at different levels, as enshrined in the new standards-based curriculum, false.
May God bless our homeland Ghana and make the next year very satisfying.
Signed
Peter Anti
(Executive Director, Ag.)
