National Education Forum begins Feb. 18

The National Education Forum engagements will open on Tuesday, February 18, this year and climax with a two-day validation conference from Thursday, February 27, this year, in Accra.

The engagements will take off in the Volta Regional capital, Ho, after which the first zonal engagement for the Volta and Oti regions will start before it moves to other regions.

The eight-member National Education Forum Planning Committee said yesterday that the Volta/Oti region events would begin the zonal engagements, with the climax at the validation workshop at the University of Professional Studies, Accra (UPSA) on February 27 and 28, this year.

The committee has zoned the country into the northern zone, the middle zone, and the southern zones for the stakeholder engagements, beginning with the Ho/Oti regional zone on February 19, where a total of 100 participants are expected.

The Greater Accra and Eastern regions will hold engagements in Accra, while the Western and Central regions will hold theirs in Cape Coast, both to be held concurrently on February 21, this year.

The Upper East and North East stakeholders will converge on Bolgatanga, while the Western North, Bono, Ahafo and Bono East regional zone will meet in Sunyani on February 24.

The last session of engagements would be for the Upper West, Savannah and Northern regional zones, and the meetings would be held in Tamale on February 25, with a separate meeting for the Ashanti Region in Kumasi on February 26.

Theme

With the engagement on the theme: “Transforming education for a sustainable future”, the committee hopes that the meetings would provide a broader framework within which “our interrogation of issues at the forum will be achieved,” the Chairman of the Planning Committee, Prof. George K. T. Oduro, told journalists yesterday (Feb 14) to outline the programme of activities for the conference.

The committee paid attention to the education strategic plan for 2018 to 2030, and the manifesto of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), as well as inputs from experienced people in the country in arriving at the theme and the focus of the conference.

“So, we thought that the theme: Transforming Education for a Sustainable Future, provides a broader framework within which our interrogation of issues at the forum will be achieved.

“Under this, referencing the NDC manifesto, we came out with five key pillars, looking at the current state of our educational system, the challenges associated with the system,” he told the journalists.

Pillars

The first of the five pillars, Prof. Oduro said, would address issues of infrastructure, both physical and virtual, such as information and communication technology (ICT), while the second would be on providing quality education.

“Here we expect stakeholders to engage with this pillar within the context of our basic education, our secondary education, tertiary education and TVET, with issues such as inclusivity cutting across,” he added. 

The third pillar, he said, would look at regulation, accountability and governance, adding that the committee selected the pillar because, “we realise that if institutions, educational institutions, are not regulated, if they are not guided, if we don't have a frame within which they operate, then meeting the targets or the purpose for which they are set up cannot be fulfilled.

“Related to this is accountability.

That if people heading educational institutions, if teachers teaching, if students themselves, if supervisors, if directors of education do not internalise the principle of accountability, investment in education would not meet the purpose for which the investment is made.

“The third one under this pillar is governance.

Governance because if we do not have strong functional systems that will support the accomplishment, the process of accomplishing tasks, we cannot achieve anything,” Prof. Oduro added, explaining that without proper governance, “we cannot achieve anything”.

Prof. Oduro said while the fourth pillar, education financing, would focus on sustained funding, to ensure quality education outcomes, the fifth pillar would centre on research and data.

He was hopeful that the theme would be interrogated within the five key pillars, adding that the conference would be handled by Ghanaians both local and in the diaspora who were experts in various aspects of education.

He was happy that two Ghanaians in the diaspora – in the United Kingdom and Australia – had agreed to deliver keynote addresses and would attend the conference at no cost to the government in appreciation of what President John Dramani Mahama had done by opening up the discussion to diverse people.

Prof. Joseph S. Agbenyega, who will be coming from Australia, will be giving the first keynote on the theme, “Transforming education for a sustainable future,” while Prof. Kwame Akyeampong, who is from the United Kingdom, will look at the theme within a context of teaching and learning.