According to a Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) report on Access to and Quality of Basic and Secondary Education in Ghana (2000-2023), while trends in quality have varied over time, access to education has increased steadily.
According to the survey, in both the junior high and senior high school levels, the gender gaps in education are particularly noticeable in the areas of mathematics and English language.
According to the report, “gender disparities in educational quality, as measured by core subject pass rates, persist.”
It demonstrated that the gender gap was subject-specific and that, although there were differences between the sexes in English and mathematics, there was parity between boys and girls in the sciences and social studies.
For example, in the 2021 West African Senior School Certificate Examination, girls scored higher on the English section (60 percent) than boys (50 percent), while boys (70 percent) performed better in mathematics than girls (60 percent).
Nonetheless, the report said that gender parity had been attained at the elementary level and that gender differences in access to education had diminished over time.
Gap
We discovered that the gender gap varies greatly depending on the issue. When he gave a presentation of the report’s highlights yesterday in Accra, Government Statistician Prof. Samuel Kobina Annim stated, “Although we are currently seeing convergence and parity in the case of boys and girls for Sciences and Social Studies, we continue to see gaps from the perspectives of English (Language) and Mathematics where we see girls performing better in English and boys performing better in Mathematics.”
He said that a sizable percentage of students at all four educational levels—kindergarten, primary, junior high, and senior high—were not within the anticipated age range.
He said that, in contrast to access to education, the quality of education varied significantly by location.
While some goals have been achieved, Prof. Annim stated that other goals, such as net enrollment, have not yet been reached at any of the four educational levels.
“What is occurring at the regional level is the final important lesson to be learned.
Therefore, it is not just regional differences but also glaring differences from the perspective of educational quality,” he stated.
Launching
In order to provide high-quality education, his organization would prefer to rely on professionals in the field rather than politicians, according to Education Minister Haruna Iddrisu, who also introduced the study.
He praised the Ghana Statistical Service for its creative assessment, which used data from the previous 20 years to show which areas the government should prioritize.
Regarding reducing regional differences, Mr. Iddrisu promised that the government would make every effort to guarantee the fair allocation of funds, upgrade the facilities at rural schools, and place more qualified educators in underprivileged areas.
The minister went on to say, “To improve learning outcomes, we need to invest more in teacher training, implement some curriculum reforms, and use modern teaching methods.”
The Danes Statistical Service and Ghana’s have a solid relationship, according to a fraternal greeting from Denmark’s ambassador to Ghana, Tom Norring.
Report
The gross enrolment rate (GER) at the kindergarten level more than quadrupled over the past 20 years, from 51.0% to 122.0%, according to the research.
It further claimed that within the same time frame, the net enrolment rate (NER) rose from 34% to 66%.
At the primary level, both GER and NER have increased by roughly 20 percentage points during the past 20 years.
“During the 2022–2023 school year, GER and NER were 98.0 percent and 47.0 percent, respectively, meaning that less than half of the pupils are in the projected age range at the junior high school level.
“NER has roughly doubled between 2005/06 and 2020/21 from 16.0 per cent to 31.0 per cent, and the gross enrolment rate at the SHS (senior high school) level has nearly tripled from 25.0 per cent in 2005/06 to 72.0 per cent in 2022/23,” the report said.
According to the report, a significantly higher percentage of students at SHS were not of legal age (averaging roughly 50.0% from 2005–06 to 2019–20), closely followed by JHS (averaging roughly 45.0% from 2001–02 to 2019–20), kindergarten (averaging roughly 30.0% from 2003–04 to 2019–20), and primary (averaging roughly 20% from 2001–02 to 2019–20).
According to the research, girls’ kindergarten NER was somewhat greater than boys’, particularly following the 2014–15 peak.
It stated that the NER for boys in primary school had been higher for over ten years, starting in 2001–2002. Parity was then attained until 2019–20, when the NER for girls increased by 2.1 percentage points.
It stated that, in contrast to the data from prior years, the NER for girls in JHS exceeded that of boys starting in 2017–18.
Targets
Kindergarten and primary school GERs in 2020 fell 5.0 and 17.7 percentage points short of the ESP (education strategy plan) expectations, respectively.
Shortfalls of 4.6 and 7.8 percentage points, respectively, were observed in the 2015 and 2020 ESP targets for gross enrolment at the JHS level. It said that there was a 3.2 percentage point increase in gross enrolment at the SHS level over the 2020 ESP target.
The ESP targets for NER in 2020 were not met across all educational levels, according to the report, with the worst deficits occurring at the kindergarten and primary levels, at 18.6 and 11.7 percentage points, respectively.
Enrollment at all four educational levels made steady progress toward gender parity between 2001–02 and 2019–20. By 2022–2023, there were more girls than boys in junior high and senior high schools.
While kindergarten was the only grade level where boys were enrolled in greater numbers than girls, gender parity was attained at the primary level.
From 2001/02 to 2019/20, gender parity (1.0) was observed at every level, with the exception of kindergarten, which fell to 0.98 in 2022/23 after reaching parity (1.0) in 2005/06 and 2006/07. With a peak of 1.1 in 2022–2023, more girls than boys have been enrolled at the SHS level over the past three years, according to the report.
The GER at the kindergarten level more than doubled from 51 percent to 122 percent between 2001 and 2003, according to the report’s trend analysis of enrollment. Primary GER increased from 80 to 90 percent, JHS GER increased from 64 to 98 percent, and SHS GER tripled from 25 to 72 percent.
Significant percentages of students at all four educational levels were not within projected ages, according to figures on NER, which gauge age-appropriate enrollment, even if GER was high.
Kindergarten NER was 66% in 2023, which means that two out of every three children between the ages of four and five were enrolled in kindergarten, while 80% of children between the ages of six and eleven were enrolled in primary school.
Less than half of the pupils between the ages of 12 and 14 were enrolled at the age-appropriate level at the JHS level (47 percent).
Quality Education
Quality of education reported stark disparities between regions in comparison with access to education.
For instance, pupil-to-trained-teacher ratios in the Northern, North East and Savannah areas were larger than 50 kids per qualified teacher, more than twice that in larger Accra (25 pupils each trained teacher).
In terms of core subject pass rates, there were also differences. In 2019, the Bono Region had the highest WASSCE Mathematics pass rate, about five times higher than the North East Region, which had the lowest pass rate.
Larger discrepancies are found for English Language pass rates, with the best region, Bono (75.3 per cent), registering pass rates more than 10 times higher than the rates in the North East (5.1 per cent) and Savannah (8.0 per cent) regions.
The Executive Director of Africa Education Watch, Kofi Asare, who chaired the event, said he saw the collaboration between the GSS and the Ministry of Education and the Ghana Education Service to be critical in shaping “our forward movement towards the last five years of the journey to the end of SDG (Sustainable Development Goal) Four”.
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