Education Minister Advocates Creative Approaches to Service Delivery

By Cliff Ekuful

The Minister of Education, Dr Matthew Opoku Prempeh has advocated a system that is open and adaptive to the delivery of services, if the country is to achieve the goals set out in the Education Strategic Plan (ESP).

According to him, in spite of the progress made over the period, the ministry was still faced with enormous challenges as it strived to achieve the goals set out in the ESP.

"Meeting the set goals will thus, require a system that is open and adaptive of innovative and creative approaches to the delivery of services," he emphasised.

Dr Prempeh made the call when he opened this year's National Education Week (NEW) in Accra on Tuesday.

This year's week is the second edition and is on the theme, 'Reforming the education sector for effective service delivery: Embracing innovations.'

It is being attended by major stakeholders in the education sector.

The NEW is a platform created by the Ministry of Education to enable it to engage stakeholders annually with the view to reviewing the sector's performance and collectively strategise towards the attainment of targets in the ensuing year.

Dr Prempeh explained that the ESP enjoined that the ministry worked to achieve 65% of all Primary 4 pupils proficiency in English by 2030, adding that "Currently, 37% of Primary 4 pupils are proficient in English. In mathematics, the ESP target is to achieve 50% proficiency rate by all Primary 4 pupils by 2030. The current Primary 4 mathematics proficiency rate is 22%."

He said while there was high level of optimism in achieving the ESP targets, it was important that lessons from the implementation of previous strategic plans made the sector open to innovative and creative ways of implementing and financing the ESP.

"As a sector we have grown accustomed to our ways of teaching and delivering lessons, monitoring and supervision, assessment, human resource development and career development among others. While these approaches have resulted in some modest improvement in the sector, achieving the ESP targets by 2030 requires improvement in learning and access to occur at a faster pace than the current rate of improvement," he emphasised.

The minister said currently, there was an ongoing discussion with Vodacom to use innovative funding mechanism to develop a data management system dashboard for decision making.

"Again, we are in discussions with Education Outcomes Fund (EOF) to launch outcomes based initiatives in education by leveraging private sector resources," he added.

He said such collaborative partnerships with non-state actors had been pursued in the past, adding that, "For instance, non-state actors were the main implementing partners in the delivery of Complementary Basic Education (CBE). Through the partnerships under CBE, the ministry has trained and successfully mainstreamed over 250,000 out-of-school children in the formal school system."

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