Act decisively to fix problems in the education sector

Kumasi, Oct 19, GNA - A leading member of the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) has urged the government to get its acts together to fix problems bedeviling the education sector to assure the country's youth of a more secured and rewarding future.

Mr George Ayisi-Boateng described as worrying and embarrassing the lack of classrooms and dormitories for fresh students in Senior High Schools (SHS) and said every effort should be made to tackle this.

"The Mills Administration must accept responsibility. There should not be any excuses," he said in a statement on Tuesday.

Mr Ayisi-Boateng said the messy situation could have been avoided if the government had had its priorities right.

He wondered why the government for close to two years could not put in place the necessary measures and resources to create space for classrooms and accommodation for the students.

He rejected what he said, was the desperate attempts at blaming the previous Kufuor Administration for the crisis in the SHS, insisting that, they had developed a well-thought out action plan for the schools.

It was not for nothing that the NPP Government built model schools and upgraded Teacher Training Colleges into Diploma Awarding Institutions.

Mr Ayisi-Boateng also warned of looming danger in 2013, when there would be two batches of SHS students competing for admission into the universities and other tertiary institutions as a result of the decision to revert the SHS from four to three years.

He said the expectation was that the President John Evans Mills, a former university lecturer, would have done more to make things better for the nation's education but his performance so far has been disappointing.

The strike action by University Teachers Association (UTAG) and Polytechnic Teachers Association (POTAG) as well as protest by school children in the Bawku Municipality over food clearly showed that things are really getting worse.

Answers to these, certainly, do not lie with hanging portraits of the President in the classrooms, he added.