Education Minister has no Power to Close Down Schools- Parliament .

The comforting message to under performing Schools is that Education Minister has no Power to Close Down Schools- Parliament . Seemingly, the popular resultant of the Education Review which kicked off at Kumasi on Saturday and ended on Sunday was the closure of non-performing schools to cutdown government expenditure.

The Deputy Ranking Member of Education Committee in Parliament, Dr. Clement Abas Apaak has criminalized and vehemently debunked the pronouncement of the Education Minister To close non performing schools. He said as the constitution spells out clearly and emphatically stated, the minister of Education has no power to close down any school in Ghana.

There is no law that warrant him to take such actions. He added that as an Education minister you have to hold the bull by the horns by tackling or rectifying the major causes of the under performance of the tagged schools.

He again said Of late government is solely paying attention to Free Senior High Schools to the neglection of the basic schools forgetting that if the fundamentals are weak academic work suffers. In his statement he added that about two years now no Capitation Grant has been paid to the basic schools. How then can the schools run professionally.

He added that, due to this clueless and calous politically centred policies in education, it is difficult for them to function as by addressing educational issues. He gave a senario that At times teachers need to write terminal exams on chalk board for students to copy in this 21st century.

Another reason he gave was that, the automatic promotion of students is never the best. Ironically stated He said agreeably there are no two students with the same IQ levels. Some students need extra time, care and attention to understand concepts and principles. As it is today, students with aggregate 50 are even admitted into the senior high schools.

Some of these students can neither read nor write. The masters end up using the precious three years to teach them how to read. How can the teacher perform magic for the students to pass. He believed all these works should have been carried out at the Basic level. Meanwhile, attention is not giving to our basic schools hence they are under capacitated to deliver their mandate.

He believed government is too anxious on Free SHS because it was a campaign promise and rather neglecting the most prudent things that needs to be done in our schools.

He also had the assession that, the entire education in Ghana is in a mess an so if proper care is not taken to address these issues sooner than later the issues will keep on compounding even to a worser degree than what we are experiencing today.