The new minister mentioned in a tweet on his page that he is looking forward to taking up the new role and facing any challenge head-on.

“Off to my new role as Universities & Science Minister and looking forward to the challenges ahead – thank you for your excellent work @JoJohnsonUK. A massive thank you to all prisons & probation staff, particularly prison officers, for your incredible dedication & hard work”.

According to the BBC, Gyimah, who was born in Buckinghamshire but spent some of his childhood in his mother’s native Ghana, studied philosophy, politics and economics at Somerville College, Oxford.

He worked for Goldman Sachs for five years before opting for a career in politics, and became Conservative MP for East Surrey in 2010.

He served as a government whip and was parliamentary private secretary to the former Prime Minister, David Cameron, from 2012 to 2013,

Sam Gyimah campaigned to remain in the European Union in the Brexit vote.

He was also prisons Minister, before taking up the post as Universities Minister on Tuesday

Mr. Gyimah’s role straddles the Department of Education and the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

He replaces Jo Johnson, who has been made Transport Minister.

Mr. Gyimah, 41, will work alongside the newly-appointed Education Secretary, Damian Hinds, who is replacing Justine Greening.

He is happily married with two children.

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By: citifmonline.com with files from the BBC

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Professor Osei K. Darkwa, the Chairman of CIU, said he believed that private universities had reached a stage where they needed a radical departure from the current affiliation system.

“The university affiliation system should be a facilitator to foster collaborations and innovations, but it is not the case. The number of private tertiary institutions has increased over the years, which has increased the number of mentee institutions assigned to the limited mentor institutions,” he said.

Prof. Darkwa, who is also the President of the Ghana Technology University College (GTUC), made the call at the 11th Anniversary Celebration of the CIU coupled with the launch of the Union’s Second Education Fair, in Accra.

It was under the theme; “Private Tertiary Institutions Affiliation with Public Universities in Ghana: A Bane or A Blessing”.

An affiliated university or affiliated college is an educational institution that operates independently, but also has a formal collaborative agreement with another, usually larger institution, that may have some level of control or influence over its academic policies, standards or programmes.

Prof. Darkwa said the huge number of mentee institutions assigned were likely to hamper standards and educational quality at the mentor university itself, as majority of the faculty members were likely to spend part of the academic time in monitoring the activities of mentee institutions.

“The rigidity of the current affiliation system is a major hindrance for creativity and imaginative activities. There is a need for a new model and transformation of the current affiliation system if we are to achieve educational quality and excellence. We call for universities to be made completely autonomous so that they can design their own academic programs, select their students, appoint and promote their lecturers, and determine their own methods of teaching. This would help promote academic excellence and provide a long cherished academic freedom to enable them to develop and offer innovative programmes consistent with their mission and vision,” he said.

Prof. Darkwa said that there was the need for dialogue among all educational stakeholders to work towards the implementation of a new system that would regulate the establishment of a new tertiary institution and implement a new road map for the progressive facing out of the affiliation process.

He said as a matter of urgency, a process should be initiated to review the years in existence requirement for existing universities to initiate the charter process.

“Aspects of the charter standards could be applied to private universities so that once these standards are met, a private tertiary institution could be granted the power to issue its degree similar to the public universities established by Act of Parliament,” he said.

Mr Kwame Dattey, the Executive Secretary of NAB, acknowledged the sensitivity of the theme of the celebration, saying it had been a bother to the Council for some time now and expressed the hope that the Union would come up with implementable suggestions.

Touching on curbing the disparity in submissions between the mentor institutions and the National Accreditation panel, he said the panel had written to the mentoring institutions to send an expert in the subject area to contribute to ensuring that the panel’s recommendations were implemented.

“If you are an expert in the field and you think what the accreditation panel says is not what should be done, you have every right not to accept and lodge a complaint to the Accreditation Board to reverse the recommendation,” he said.

He said prospective students should check the NAB website to confirm if their desired schools had been accredited before applying.

Dr Koryoe Anim-Wright, the President of African University College of Communications, said it was time to closely look at the accreditation process holistically with an eye towards phasing out the system of affiliation and streamlining the accreditation process for quality assurance and maintenance of university standards.

She said a proactive way in which the Government could assist private university colleges was by modifying the GET Fund Act to allow access to infrastructure support.

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Source: GNA

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That could change, however. Under plans by science and higher education minister Jaroslaw Gowin, Poland’s top universities could shift from teaching to instead foster innovations that will power future businesses.

“Under the communist regime [until 1989] access to university-level studies was limited. In my generation just 7 per cent of people graduated,” says Mr Gowin, also deputy prime minister.

“Then, when communism collapsed, young people started studying on a massive scale.

“That brought about fantastic effects. But it also had some negative implications . . . Polish universities over the past few decades have focused heavily on education, and overlooked the importance of research,” Mr Gowin tells the FT.

“We need to be able to reverse that phenomenon now, by establishing more elite universities that would . . . educate fewer students, and focus primarily on research that can later be applied in the economy.”

According to data from Eurostat, Poland produced 598,000 graduates in 2013, the third-highest number in Europe after Britain and France.

Training them is not cheap. Poland spent 1.2 per cent of GDP on tertiary education in 2013, according to OECD data, the same as France and just below Germany.

That is a source of talent and part of what attracts investors.

But politicians fret that too many educated Poles work in process-oriented jobs in factories or in service centres for global companies seeking lower costs, or that they leave Poland.

In the wider economy, the equivalent of just 0.9 per cent of GDP is spent on research and development, under half the EU average and below Poland’s goal of 1.7 per cent by 2020.

Mr Gowin hopes his plan will change that, but says: “I know I face a big battle with academics [that] will start as soon as I announce the competition to select the few elite universities.”

Proponents of Mr Gowin’s proposed reforms point to Britain, France and Germany and the support they give to top institutions — such as Oxford, Cambridge, Paris-Sorbonne and Berlin’s Humboldt university — that has helped them become research leaders and business incubators.

“If we fail to establish elite universities, thousands of students, the very best and most brilliant ones, will leave to study in the UK, the US or elsewhere in Europe,” says Mr Gowin.

There are already hopeful signs for Poland. In August, it was listed alongside Australia, China and Turkey in a study by consulting firm Firetail as a country where universities could challenge the dominance of elite institutions in places such as the US and UK over the next two decades.

Jagiellonian University in Krakow and the University of Warsaw were named in the 2016 edition of the global Nature Index, which ranks universities that have increased their level of high-quality research over the past three years.

In 2014 Warsaw university also announced it would start a co-operation initiative with the University of Cambridge in the UK to jointly set up a centre of excellence for research.

“It is a task ahead of each and every state to reinforce and invigorate academic and educational elites. And that is what our government believes in,” Mr Gowin says.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2017. All rights reserved. You may share using our article tools. Please don’t cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web.
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Source: Financial Times

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This upgrade followed a re-assessment report submitted on the Cape Coast and Tamale Polytechnics.

A statement signed by the Minister of Education, Professor Jane Naana Opoku Agyeman, indicated that this upgrade was “based on the expert panel’s initial assessment of all ten polytechnic. The six polytechnics that met the criteria will be upgraded to Technical Universities by end of September, 2016.”

Initial outcry from Cape Coast, Tamale

The Cape Coast and Tamale Polytechnics initially did not meet the 16 point criteria laid down for qualification for conversion, which assessed the varying levels of infrastructure and capacity.

After missing out, the two institutions came out to accuse government of masterminding to get them out of the conversion.

The Tamale Polytechnic Chapter of the Polytechnic Teachers Association of Ghana (POTAG), went as far as giving government up to September 2016, to convert the Tamale Polytechnic into a technical university.

President John Mahama later revealed that, the outstanding issues that hindered the conversion of the Cape Coast and Tamale Polytechnics into technical Universities had been resolved.

Polytechnic conversions

The conversions of polytechnics into technical universities was one of President John Mahama’s manifesto promises ahead of the 2012 general elections.

According to government, the purpose of the conversion into technical universities is to bridge the gap between academia and industry.

A technical committee on the conversion of polytechnics to technical universities, announced its decision to convert all polytechnics into technical universities beginning 2016.

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By: Delali Adogla-Bessa/citifmonline.com/Ghana

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