The vice presidential candidate of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) for the December 7 elections, Dr Matthew Opoku Prempeh, has emphasised that the government is creating an education environment that equips graduates with skills, knowledge, and the adaptability they need to succeed in a rapidly changing world.
In that regard, he said, the government had since 2017, undertaken bold reforms in higher education, resulting in fundamental changes to policy, regulation, institutional mandates, governance and curricula.
Dr Prempeh, who was speaking at the University of Memphis in the United States of America (USA) last Friday, said education was an important bedrock of a progressive productive country, and key to development.
He said many countries with little or no natural resources had seen remarkable outcomes that turned their countries around and opened up opportunities for all by investing in the education of their citizens.
Dr Prempeh said it followed, therefore, that access and equity were two key elements in the drive to improve teaching and learning outcomes in order to make the desired impact.
By that, he said, “the pathway into education must be with as few barriers as possible to enable a critical mass of citizens to access education”.
That access, he said, must have an equity component so that all children could have an equal opportunity to access the best education possible, irrespective of their backgrounds.
Furthermore, Dr Prempeh said critical factors such as infrastructure, and teaching and learning materials remained critical to achieving the desired access and outcomes of education.
Topic
Dr Prempeh, who spoke on the topic: “Implementing a national policy for educational access and equity”, highlighted the NPP government’s commitment to providing access to education, saying the previous NPP administration between 2001 and 2009 led by President John Agyekum Kufuor took steps to increase access to basic education.
School enrolment
Dr Prempeh said data from 2013 to 2016 showed that, on average, 100,000 children passed the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) each year, but could not enrol in senior high school (SHS) due to financial constraints.
“This represented about 35 per cent of all placed students. Among those who did enrol, 22 per cent dropped out, again for financial reasons,” he explained.
Within one year of the rolling out of the Free Senior High School policy, he said, the 35 per cent rate of students failing to take up their places was halved to about 17 per cent.