The Vice President Kwesi Amissah-Arthur has described as “totally inexcusable,” attempts by leadership of the teachers to justify absenting themselves from the classroom.
Reports from the World Bank and the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) have ranked Ghana first, in teacher absenteeism in West Africa.
“I don’t think the teachers who we look up to should be encouraging this behavior,” he said.
During the celebration of the 20th National Best Teacher Awards ceremony on Sunday, the GNAT president, Alexander Boadi attempted to justify the reasons teacher absenteeism was high in Ghana.
[contextly_sidebar id=”HreqxlA3XMVeYQiXlB0Ny3OZpMqSO4jN”]He said “the practice was prevalent due to the many challenges teachers experience in their line of duty.”
But the Vice President disagreed and rather called for drastic measures to be put in place to totally eliminate the practice.
“I don’t think it is excusable”.
He said even the reduction of teacher absenteeism from 27 percent as of 2013, to about 11 percent, currently, is not good enough.
“Even the 10 percent is way way too high”, Amissah-Arthur said.
He challenged the Association of Teachers to come up with “scientific reasons”, accounting for teacher absenteeism, so that the problem could be tackled properly.
However, in an interview with Citi News, the Acting General Secretary of GNAT, M.V. Demanya, said instead of attacking them, the Vice President should have touched on issues relating to their welfare, their conditions of service .
“He [Vice President] picked on only that one because that is where he thinks he has a problem and is not pleasing to him but we would have loved to hear a response to the other elements that we raised which will be to better our welfare,” he said.
Demanya defended the GNAT president’s submissions saying “people have some personal reasons for absenting themselves. We are not encouraging people to use personal reasons to absent themselves and that is not what he was saying.”
As part of measures to revive the dwindling educational standards in the country, the Education Ministry instituted the ‘Zero Tolerance for Teacher Absenteeism’ policy and subsequently set up a committee to implement it.
So far, teacher absenteeism has been reduced from 27 to 11 percent according to the Education Ministry.
To achieve the total elimination of the practice, the Ministry has disclosed it is implementing a system where public school teachers will be paid according to the number of days they show up to teach.
–
By: Efua Idan Osam/citifmonline.com/Ghana
Follow @osamidan