Vice President gripped by NAGRAT strike action

Accra, Oct. 25, GNA - Gripped by the effect of the protracted industrial action by the National Association of Graduate Teachers (NAGRAT) on teaching and learning, Vice President Alhaji Aliu Mahama on Wednesday called for an immediate end to the stalemate.

He said the strike action had affected the educational reforms scheduled for next year, whilst most students in the senior secondary schools were on voluntary holidays.

Vice President Alhaji Mahama made this known in a speech read on his behalf in Accra during the opening of the 44th Annual Conference of the Heads of Assisted Senior Secondary Schools (CHASS) on the theme: The 2007 Educational Reform: Implications and Challenges."

"Most of these students have become victims of circumstances beyond their control. Those who were not engaged in bad habits have suddenly been initiated. Others who were already deeply involved in all types of wrong doings may not be salvaged by the time that the stalemate presently on our hands is resolved," he said.

Alhaji Mahama said the adverse effect of the NAGRAT strike action was on children who were the future leaders of the country. "It saddens me that in spite of the appeal by the President to NAGRAT to return to the classroom, as well as pleas from well meaning opinion leaders and fellow citizens, NAGRAT still remains adamant and steadfast on their demands."

Focusing on the CHASS members, he said: "As managers of second cycle schools, you are expected to be innovative and proactive in handling crisis before they blow up on our faces."

Vice President Alhaji Mahama said a consultative and participatory approach in the management of second cycle schools would reduce some of the avoidable issues often encountered in school administration. He said all efforts and resources aimed at improving on education would come to naught if discipline was not enforced among students. "I therefore urge you as managers of your schools to instil discipline in your students. But you have to be disciplined first. It is only when you are clean that you will be able to ask another person to wash him or her self.

Professor Jophus Anamuah-Mensah, Vice Chancellor of the University of Education, Winneba, said in his keynote that the youth were learning new values such as power, violence, glamour, comfort and sensual enjoyment from commercial television and movie screens while rape, humiliation, physical abuse were on the increase.

He said the educational reforms offered a paradigm shift from academic rationalism to the social reconstruction-relevance orientation, which was concerned with making education socially relevant to the economy.

Prof Anamuah-Mensah said the impending reforms called for school practices that were driven by research.

Mr Bolina Saaka, President of CHASS also appealed to members of the NAGRAT to return to the classroom, saying once they had succeeded in draw national and international attention to the plight of teachers they must now confine the process to negotiation.

He called for the upward review of the 7,200 cedi feeding grant to students and school fees to wean school heads from the management stress they go through.

"We expect more sympathy and goodwill from our employers to save school heads from the stress they go through," he said. The Accra Metropolitan Catholic Archbishop, Most Reverend Charles Palmer Buckle, who chaired the function, asked the school heads to elicit the support of parents to run the show, adding: "Parents must understand the stress they go through."