Dr. Yaw Osei Adutwum
Minister of Education Dr. Yaw Osei Adutwum, has said six new Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) schools will be opened this year to further bridge the gap between the sciences and humanity programmes in the country.
According to him, the STEM schools will be opened at Abomosu, Kpasenkpe, Bosomtwe (for girls only), Accra Senior High School and TVET School at East Legon, intimating that this forms part of the government’s agenda to promote STEM education in the country.
Speaking at the meet-the-press series in Accra over the weekend, the Minister indicated that 20 STEM centres, including 10 model STEM Senior High Schools, had been started across the country and would soon be completed for use.
Dr. Adutwum said this is work-in-progress by the government to improve the science to humanity programmes’ ratio of 60:40, and noted that the introduction of the one-year pre-engineering programme would further bridge the gap.
He asserted that “It is not good enough to build classroom blocks and lecture halls. You also have to look at professional development which is to train the very people who are going to be in that facility.”
“You re-arrange teaching and learning within the facilities. What kind of tools (do you give) to the teachers and students? All these may become policy initiatives that you will embark upon,” he indicated and added that the education system should have intervention programmes that are designed to determine when students are not doing well and support them.
“When a student walks into a Junior High School and cannot read, do we just lament, and make her sink or swim? Why do [they do] 10 courses in high school and the student cannot read and write?” he asked rhetorically and continued that it is not good to allow such students to only gravitate towards memorisation because they cannot read and write.
For the Minister, students who only gravitate towards memorisation do not have their own grammar, except that of the teacher who wrote notes for them, intimating, “These are common sense approaches to reform you hear us talk about.”
“They are nothing new other than the fact that we need to really bridge the gap in our education system and remove the bottlenecks in order to allow our nation to compete with the rest of the world,” he pointed out.
Dr. Adutwum said Ghana was blessed with great talents, and that what was required is for the education system to work on the young ones for them to be able to “compete with anyone in anywhere in the world and excel.”
“But, we have work to do. Giant strikes have been made but it is not good enough. We can’t compete with the rest of the world when the first time we get to know of students’ achievement or outcomes is 11 years after they enrolled and that has been with the country for a long time,” he submitted.
He continued, “We have two years of KG, six years of primary, three years of Junior High [school], and you add them up and that is 11 years. And it is at the end of the 11 years that we will do our first national exams and whether they do well or not, it is too late for that particular student.”
“In other nations around the world, they are able to assess their students along the line before they hit the 11 years or 14 years. So when you hear us talking about the national standardised test, it is to enable the country to know how well our students are doing and not wait till the 11 years,” the Minister explained.
He said 500,000 students across the country participated in the first national standardised test, and disclosed that the results would soon be out for the country to know how well primary four students are doing.
“This academic year, we are going to access primary two students. We will assess primary four, and primary six students. The goal is for us to know how students are doing and prescribe intervention thereafter the test,” he stressed.
According to him, the government was envisaging a community where 90% of the children at age 10 would be able to read and write before they progress to Junior High School.
BY Ernest Kofi Adu