Government to increase SHS transition rate to university – Minister
Dr Yaw Osei Adutwum, Minister of Education, says the government is working to create a successful pathway from kindergarten to Senior High School (SHS) to increase tertiary enrolment.
The initiative, the Minister said, would ensure a 70 per cent pass rate for SHS graduates and their transition into the University for the country’s human development.
The Minister said this on Wednesday, on the third day of this year’s National Education Week in Accra, on the theme: “Re-assessing Educational Policies for Effective Service Delivery and National Transformation.”
“When you have 48 high schools in the country with a pass rate or high school to university transition rate of one per cent or less, it is not acceptable.”
“Our analysis revealed that in about two to five years, the country will have about 50 per cent of our high school graduates effectively transitioning to our universities, from the current 35 per cent.
“When 30 per cent of our students pass the WASSCE, and it improves to 35 per cent, we celebrate, without telling the world and our country that the 65 per cent of the students did not make it to the University.
He commended Mastercard Foundation and UNICEF for supporting the Ministry of Education and Ghana Education Service to provide quality and equitable learning opportunities for Ghanaian children in the country.
Dr Adutwum said the Ministry would always use the platform to drive a transformation agenda within the education sector and urged the agencies and education managers to drive improvements at their various levels of education.
The Government, he said, had embarked on a macro reform, including school inspections, curriculum development, teacher licensure, and policy interventions that ensured that the nation’s education system was transformed.
The Minister charged Governing Councils of Colleges of Education to produce innovative teachers to meet 21st century learning spaces and be fit for purpose to meet the changing needs of education.
He said the Ministry was working to address the mismatch between academia and industry, and cautioned training institutions to check with the Government before offering courses that would not meet industry needs.
“When universities are setting up campuses across the country and rolling students into a diploma in education programme and producing over 10,000 students yearly without opportunities.” Do you blame GES for not hiring them? To what extent did they lease with GES through GTEC to ensure that there would be opportunity for those graduates?
“When you produce these students without recourse to opportunities for jobs, then you are the cause of graduate unemployment in the country,” he said.
He said the country had invested in STEM education and had built six state-of-the-art science laboratories, stressing that research revealed that 40 per cent of jobs may not exist in the next 10 years.
Dr Adutwum said the Government had introduced a one-year pre-engineering course for graduates of SHS students without offering science as their elective.
The initiative, which was being piloted at the University of Mines and Technology and Pentecost University, was to encourage Arts students who had the desire to offer engineering programmes at the University to do so.
Source: GNA