Underfunding makes the new curriculum ineffective – CAPCOE
The Campaign Against Privatisation and Commercialisation of Education (CAPCOE), an educational think tank, has said lack of funding is a challenge on the effective and efficient implementation of new curricula in the educational sector, especially at the basic level.
Mr. Richard Kovey, the National Convenor of CAPCOE, disclosed this at a stakeholders’ meeting organised by the Ghana News Agency, Tema Regional Office.
He said funding problems were already impeding the implementation of the Standard Base Curriculum.
Mr. Kovey emphasised that ‘the standard-based curriculum has already failed because it lacked the basic funding. Digital literacy, creativity, and collaboration are being taught normally without any action; they learn like storytelling and come out not knowing what it is.’
The Ghana Education Service (GES) introduced the standard-based curriculum for kindergarten through primary school in 2019 with the aim of replacing the objective-based curriculum and restructuring basic education to include s
enior high school.
The new curriculum was supposed to be a shift from an objective-based curriculum to a standards-based curriculum with a focus on strengthening the acquisition of reading, writing, arithmetic, and creativity as foundational skills for life-long learning and national development.
He said the resources needed to support the implementation of the curriculum were not available, and therefore teachers, who were the implementers of all curricula, resorted to improvising or using the old system of teaching.
He stated, for instance, that even though under the standard-based curriculum, pupils were to be assessed through practical means other than only written examinations, there were no provisions of funding to support assessment; therefore, the continuous use of examinations only took into consideration the ability of the child to put things into memory and reproduce them for marks.
The CAPCOE convenor said even with the examination, since funding was not available for it, printing examination
papers at the end of the term was a huge challenge for public schools, leading to teachers writing a few questions on the board for the pupils to answer in their exercise book.
He therefore pleaded with the government to ensure that funding was made available for the effective implementation of curriculum to properly prepare the children from the pre-tertiary level.
‘We must ensure that whatever the child learns should be something that can be applied outside the classroom; unfortunately, each time we attempt to reform the educational sector, there is no money to support it, so we always look for the cheaper way out, which is not helping the country,’ he lamented.
He said the teaching of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) must start from the basic level instead of the current situation, adding that it was in line with psychologists’ belief that the first 10 years of the child were the best time to mould and shape their thinking and behaviours.
Source: Ghana News Agency