{"id":53781,"date":"2014-10-06T06:14:07","date_gmt":"2014-10-06T06:14:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/4cd.e16.myftpupload.com\/?p=53781"},"modified":"2014-10-06T06:14:07","modified_gmt":"2014-10-06T06:14:07","slug":"veep-clashes-with-teachers-over-absenteeism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/?p=53781","title":{"rendered":"VEEP clashes with teachers over absenteeism"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Vice President Kwesi Amissah-Arthur has described as “totally inexcusable,” attempts by leadership of the teachers to justify absenting themselves from the classroom.<\/span><\/p>\n

Reports from\u00a0the World Bank and the\u00a0United Nations International\u00a0Children\u2019s Emergency\u00a0Fund (UNICEF)\u00a0have ranked Ghana first, in teacher absenteeism in\u00a0West Africa.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think the teachers who we look up to should be encouraging this behavior,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

[contextly_sidebar id=”HreqxlA3XMVeYQiXlB0Ny3OZpMqSO4jN”]He said “the practice was prevalent due to the many challenges teachers experience in their line of duty.”<\/p>\n

But the Vice President disagreed and rather\u00a0called for drastic measures to be put in place to totally eliminate the practice.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think it is excusable\u201d.

He said even the reduction of teacher absenteeism from 27 percent as of 2013, to about 11 percent, currently, is not good enough.

\u201cEven the 10 percent is way way too high\u201d, Amissah-Arthur said.

He challenged the Association of Teachers to come up with \u201cscientific reasons\u201d, accounting for teacher absenteeism, so that the problem could be tackled properly.

However, in an interview with\u00a0<\/span>Citi News<\/strong>, 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,\u00a0their conditions of service\u00a0.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHe [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,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Demanya defended the GNAT president\u2019s submissions saying \u201cpeople 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

As part of measures to revive the dwindling educational standards in the country, the Education Ministry instituted the<\/span>\u00a0\u2018Zero Tolerance for Teacher Absenteeism\u2019 policy<\/strong> <\/span><\/a>and subsequently set up a committee to implement it.<\/span><\/p>\n

So far, teacher absenteeism has been reduced from 27 to 11 percent<\/strong><\/span><\/a>\u00a0according to the Education Ministry.<\/p>\n

To achieve the total elimination of the practice, the Ministry has disclosed it is\u00a0implementing a system<\/strong><\/span><\/a> where public school teachers will be paid according to the number of days they show up to teach.<\/p>\n

–\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

By: Efua Idan Osam\/citifmonline.com\/Ghana
\nFollow @osamidan<\/a>
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