Dr Yaw Adutwum, the Deputy Minister of Education in charge of General Education, has announced that government has introduced a ranking system for senior high schools (SHSs) to create a sense of urgency for school improvement.
He said the approach would be national ranking and similar schools ranking, explaining that the top schools with the same facilities and infrastructure would be ranked together while the so-called lower schools that share similarity in areas such as total enrolment and quality of students who enrol from junior high schools would also be ranked together.
This year, the ranking through banding procedure from one to 10, adding that band 10 are the very high performing schools while band one are the low performing schools, he added.
The Deputy Minister announced this in Accra at a meeting with heads of low performing senior high schools in five regions, organised by the Ministry of Education and the Ghana Education Service.
The regions are Western, Greater Accra, Volta, Central and Eastern. He said the ministry had realised that some of the headmasters’ performance were below average, and that most of them were not abreast with their schools’ statistics and percentage of West African Senior Secondary Certificate Examinations (WASSCE) results.
“I was shocked to ask a headmaster of a school about the performance of the school, and he said he doesn’t know; how can that be possible? A whole headmaster who is not interested in knowing how well the school had performed,” he added.
Dr Adutwum said the ranking system was to help schools with the lowest ranking to learn from best practices and improve upon their performance, as well as provide feedback for teachers and school administrators.
He said government, as part of its secondary education reforms, would introduce a professional leadership course for teachers who aspire to be headmasters.
The Deputy Minister explained that the initiative was to build the capacity of headmasters of secondary schools to be abreast with current trends in the management of schools.
Dr Adutwum said, “If the performance of a headmaster or headmistress was not encouraging, in terms of consistent failure in the WASSCE, that headmaster or headmistress would be re-assigned”.
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