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Professor Kwasi Opoku-Amankwa, the Director General of the Ghana Education Service (GES) has said textbooks that are not assessed, approved and recommended by the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NaCCA), would not be allowed in the classroom.

He explained at a news conference organised by the GES in Accra on Thursday that until NaCCA approved of them, they would not be used in the classroom for Basic and Senior High Schools.

Prof. Opoku-Amankwa said it was because of the introduction of the new curriculum, the system had moved schools from writing an objective-based to a standard-based examination to strengthen the reading, writing, arithmetic, and creativity of the students.

He said all text books were, therefore, meant to be officially assessed and approved by NaCCA to make it worthy for the students to use.

GES and NaCCA, he said, had developed training materials made up of training guides and teacher resource packs such as sample structured lessons, sample worksheet, sample yearly overview, sample termly scheme of work and sample weekly lesson plan.

The training supported by partners including Cambridge International was to equip teachers with the requisite skills and knowledge about the new curricula and enable them to focus on core competencies and assessment of learning.

The training plan had 36 National Simulators and trained 186 teachers in May 2009, he said, adding that it had also trained 3,900 Regional and District teachers in June 2019 who were expected to also train 152,000 teachers of kindergarten (KG) to Primary six.

The teachers, he said, were currently undergoing the training at 996 Cluster Centres across all Districts and Regions.

The training schedule is between August 13 to 17, August 19 to 23 and August 26 to 30, 2019.
For the new curriculum, Prof. Opoku-Amankwa said the resources provided were packs for all teachers, training materials, set of curriculum for every school (KG and Primary), and set of curriculum for every District and Regional Education office.

He disclosed that the training and resources were at a total cost of GH¢26 million.

The Director General noted that the GES had initiated the “Professional Learning Communities (PLC)” for basic schools to enable the schools dedicate an hour of every Wednesday to the PLC for monitoring, assessment, and evaluation of the effectiveness and efficiency of teachers in class and at the circuit level.

With the PLC system, teachers would undergo training within a period of an hour after students had closed to upgrade themselves.

Other development is the “Professional Development Days”, which would be organised once every quarter for teachers to undergo a full day training to develop and abreast themselves on best practices and new pedagogical skills.

Prof. Opoku-Amankwa disclosed that for the 2019/2020 academic year, Basic Schools would resume on September 10, 2019, while students being promoted to third year in the Senior High Schools would resume on August 19, 2019.

However, he said, the date for the resumption by SHS one and two students would be announced in a few weeks.