Prez urges teachers not to quit jobs after training

Spread lead, Wed. May 14/08

Story Rebecca Quaicoe Duho

THE President, John Agyekum Kufuor, has stated that it is unethical for teachers to immediately leave the profession after they have been sponsored by the Ghana Education Service (GES) to upgrade themselves.
“When the GES sponsors your education, it is unethical for you to leave the profession when you have not sufficiently given back what is expected of you,” he stated.
The President said this in a speech read on his behalf by the Chairman of the Board of Trustee of the Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETFund), Professor Yaw Safo Boafo, at the launch of the Golden Jubilee celebration of the Ghana Association of French Teachers (GAFT) in Accra yesterday.
“If you quit after your sponsored higher education, the projections and the entire policy direction of the service are seriously disturbed, if not thrown of gear,” he further said.
President Kufuor noted, however, that the fundamental cause of the problem had been identified as the unfavourable service conditions and gave the assurance that the government was seriously considering a revision of public sector salaries in the country.
He said the government had also specially targeted students of the French language in a special government project through the GETFund and this he said was aimed at giving Ghanaian students of French the opportunity to spend a part of their long vacation in France and other French-speaking countries.
The President said, “The State has no illusions whatsoever about the importance of French language as a tool of communication and its overall benefits to Ghana’s external relations in the political, economic and socio-cultural spheres.”
He said, “At a time when we, as a nation, are actively exploring bilateral relations with the international community as an important element in the development of Ghana, I would like to re-emphasise here that the education that produces the right kind of human resource base of any country, should attract the appropriate dose of attention by government and other interested groups.”
He assured members of the association of the government’s preparedness to help, in whatever form, to promote the teaching and learning of French in the country and called on stakeholders to also play their roles efficiently in promoting French as a course of study.
The Ambassador of France to Ghana, Mr Pierre Jacquemot, in an address, said the geographical location of Ghana made it imperative for it to strive to maintain its key position in the sub-region.
He said the country must be capable of providing its citizens the tools that would facilitate their communication with their neighbours, whether commercial, political or institutional.
He assured the association of the French government’s continuous support towards the development of quality teaching of French by various means and also help them upgrade themselves.
A Minister of State at the Ministry of Education, Science and Sports, Ms Elizabeth Ohene, said the government had signed an agreement with the French government to provide more teaching and learning materials to facilitate the teaching and learning of French in schools.
According to her, although the teaching and learning of French was supposed to be compulsory under the new educational reform, it had been made an optional subject due to the lack of French teachers.
She said the government had therefore employed strategies such as the creation of centres for the teaching and learning of French in the regional capitals and the empowering of three teacher training colleges to train teachers of French.
The President of GAFT, Mr Evan Kokroko, in his address, called on private schools to ensure that they employed qualified teachers of French, saying that due to the lack of teachers in the country many French-speaking and unqualified persons from neighbouring countries had infiltrated the educational system, a situation, which, he said, was not healthy for the country’s development.