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The Ghana Education Service (GES) has admitted that the survey which revealed that 98% of primary two pupils can neither read nor understand English is unacceptable.<\/p>\n
The Acting Director General of the GES, Charles Aheto Tsegah made the admission on the Citi Breakfast Show<\/strong> but appealed to Ghanaians not to draw negative conclusions based on the report.<\/p>\n He said government is working to resolve the flaws identified in the survey and improve primary education in the country.<\/p>\n An Early Grade Reading assessment report by the GES revealed that 98% of primary two pupils can neither read nor understand English.<\/strong><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n Mr. Aheto Tsegah said\u00a0the \u201cresults are not acceptable\u201d but despite the appalling statistics, the general public should not \u201crush to start making any serious conclusions about it.\u201d<\/p>\n He explained that the assessments are conducted to enable the managers of Ghana\u2019s education sector to \u201csee what we are doing to help us understand the scope of work we are delivering.\u201d<\/p>\n The assessments, he said, also helps the education service and the ministry to identify new challenges and find solutions to them.<\/p>\n The acting GES boss mentioned that although the performance has not been good, \u201cwe have always been tracking whether there is a progression in learning\u201d adding that his outfit is \u201cconcerned about slow pace of learning while we do all these assessments.\u201d<\/p>\n According to him, basic school pupils have been facing serious challenges for years and the GES is working to address the them.<\/p>\n Over the years, the GES has been doing a comparative analysis of the performance of students at primary three and primary six.<\/p>\n With the existence of a national policy on language for instruction, teachers are required to largely use the Ghanaian language as the medium of instruction while English is taught as a subject from kindergarten to primary three.<\/p>\n But according to Aheto Tsegah, the GES has realized it has been assessing the wrong class.<\/p>\n He said: \u201cIt was only just recently that we discovered that for a very long time, we had been shooting ourselves in the foot because we are assessing people who had not reached the point of assessment in certain aspects of the assessments we were doing.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cInstead of going to test primary four where at that stage, we teach them in English and therefore reinforce some of the things that we have done in primary three; we go and assess primary three students who are only learning English and who have not really acquired that we need to do a proper assessment of the progression in terms of English language,\u201d he explained.<\/p>\n The GES boss however assured parents that his outfit is doing all it can to effectively address the problem.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a challenge,\u201d he acknowledged, \u201cwe are not denying it at all but we are not sitting down and not do anything about it. We are making a lot of efforts to address it.\u201d<\/p>\n He said current statistics indicate some positive changes are taking place although very slow.<\/p>\n Variety of methods, he said will be adopted \u201cto get to the crusts of the matter and solve the problem but we are still working very hard to address that challenge.”<\/p>\n <\/p>\n By: Efua Idan Osam\/citifmonline.com\/Ghana
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