Teachers of special education need attention - Director

Agona Swedru, June 5, GNA - The Agona Municipal Director of Education, Mrs. Jane Chinebuah, has appealed to the Ghana Education Service to provide resources for in-service training for teachers of Special Needs Education. She said since challenges facing such teachers in the delivery of quality education were more than those of their counterparts in the normal schools, it was imperative that they were supported to upgrade their competency. Mrs. Chinebuah said this when she addressed a three-day in-service training for teachers of Agona Swedru Salvation Army School for the Deaf at Agona Swedru. She appealed to the authorities of the University of Education Winneba (UEW) which is responsible for training teachers of Special Needs Education to institute a follow up programme to find out how their products were faring on the field. This, the Director said, would help the authorities to redesign programme to cater for the difficulties the teachers face, and also meet modern trends.

She said the current situation where children with hearing impairment write the same Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) with their hearing counterparts called for more attention to the teachers. "If hearing individuals face challenges in their learning process and are scoring zero per cent in BECE, then it stands to reason that the hearing impaired face greater challenges," she pointed out. Ms. Naomi Pabi, Central Regional Manager of the Salvation Army Education Unit, urged teachers of Special Education to be committed to their work since such children needed more attention in grasping lessons taught.

"Do not be the type of teachers who enter the teaching profession because they have no where to go and nothing to do," she said. Mr. Seth Anim Boadi, Deputy Coordinating Director of the Agona Municipal Assembly, said the Assembly was putting up a special education complex at Agona Swedru to cater for the education of children with special needs and also pledged the support of the Assembly in upgrading the knowledge and skills of the teachers. Mr. Alexander Oppong, Senior Lecturer, Department of Special Education, University of Education, Winneba, said the authorities attached great importance to the education of the hearing impaired children that was why they had made it a policy to allocate two teachers to one pupil, one to be in-charge of interpretation and the other a note-taker. Madam Favour Afalakpui, Headmistress of the School, expressed regret that in-service training courses for teachers were most of the time generalized without any particular attention for special education teachers and said such courses were of little value to "us". She expressed gratitude to the tutors of the Special Education Department of UEW for accepting to organize the course for the teachers.