Mushrooming private schools worrying - Education Minister

Education Minister Professor Jane Naana Opoku-Agyemang has bemoaned how private schools spring up in the country without recourse to due process.

Speaking at the National Education Sector Annual Review Conference in Accra, Prof Opoku-Agyemang said the proliferation of schools without any supervision and monitoring was bad for the educational sector.

“How do schools come into being in this country? Is it enough that I can get a couple of bamboo sticks and palm fronds and call it a school? Is it enough? Is it enough that I can set up a school without any recourse to the Ministry of Education? Is it enough that in a small country called Ghana, we have all kinds of syllabuses and curricula being deployed...? Is it enough that someone comes in as a non-governmental organisation and ends up setting up schools? Where are the rules and regulations about setting up schools? In setting up schools, is the Ministry of Health involved? It should be.

How about Environmental Protection Agency? It should be. How about security? How about the site? Sometimes you are driving by and a swampy area is housing a school and you cannot understand. How can anybody set up a school without washrooms? Why are we now going round supplying water to schools? Who did the design…and more importantly, what are our children being taught and by whom and for what reason?” she asked.

But the president of the Ghana National Education Campaigners Association, Mr Bright Appiah, speaking to Class News, said the regulation for setting up schools were in place but the responsibility lay with the Ministry of Education to enforce the laws and regulate the activities of schools.

“We are telling the ministry that there is a regulation in place, that they are the authority that is supposed to regulate the activities of the private institutions that are coming up because, of course, the constitution mandates that a private person can participate in education, but the participation is not necessarily for profit-making, so, there is the need for them to also validate the institution for those who want to run the private institutions and then give them accreditation so that they can run a very good programme,” Mr Appiah stated, adding: “So, we could not leave it in the hands of them to do what they want to do, but the regulatory framework must be there to ensure that they live within the regulatory framework.

The ministry must enforce it because they are the very institution that must do that.”