Mr. Speaker, I beg to support the motion on the floor. Mr. Speaker, before I finally say the last word, I want to make a few observations.
Mr. Speaker, we realize that education
-- we are told, is the bedrock of every development in every country, but looking through the Report and especially the outlook for 2010, from item (i) to (xv), you would realize that a host of things have been stated as what we need to achieve at the end of 2010.
When you talk about the school, the pupils and the students are at the centre but who helped them to achieve their goals, it is the teachers. But when you go through all these, you do not come across much that is said about the teacher.
My worry is that, my records might not be correct but if you take the census of the Hon Members in this Parliament,
I believe we would get more than 60 per cent who are teachers, and I think that it is for us to think of our fellow teachers who are on the field working. This is woefully always forgotten.
Item 6 talks about subsidy of GH¢100 for the teacher in the rural area who is pursuing rural education: the question is, what about the others who have not got the chance to pursue distance education now but have accepted to work in the rural areas? Are they forgotten?
Aside that, are we saying that it is only the teachers in the rural areas who are working? What about the numerous teachers who are in the urban areas and cities working? What do we think about them?
If my memory serves me right, just this morning, I have heard all over that teachers are on a sit-down strike; why are they on a sit-down strike? It is because we are not thinking of them and we are not even thinking of the importance of the work that they are doing. I think something seriously needs to be done if really we want to succeed as a country that wants education as pivot for development.
Mr. Speaker, let me also go to the
“Observations” because there is not much time.
In the “Observations”, when you come to paragraph 8.1.2, my Chairman men- tioned that there was a large disparity between students studying the humanities and the sciences and then he went further to talk about the ratio of male students against female students. They are almost at par but in concluding, the Committee strongly recommends that efforts are made to accelerate the pace at which sciences and technologies are done.
What about the gender disparity, the male and the female? We seem to say that we want to encourage women as well. But
if in our Report, nothing is said about this disparity of gender, then we are not being fair to the gender issue.
Mr. Speaker, talking about rented school premises, it is good we discovered this and have seen that it causes a lot of waste to our financial resources. But I must say that O'Reilly Secondary School might be the only school that is in rented premises. I urge the Committee and for that matter, the Ministry to do all it can to find out how many of these schools are in rented premises so that we are able to do justice to them. Otherwise, we will just tackle a portion of it and leave the rest.
Now, on item 8.4 -- Provision of
free school uniforms and exercise books. In talking about free school uniforms, I believe we are talking about the fact that by the end of the year 2010, we might be able to cover all children in the country who might need school uniforms and not just the one million that we have been talking about.
Again, the school uniforms, we should remember that about three or four years ago, the unit schools had used a lot of means to get the Government approve of their uniforms. In talking about school uniforms, I suppose that they are considering both the school uniforms for the unit schools, as well as the public schools because they are all school children who need to be catered for.
Free exercise books -- Soon after
the presentation of the Budget, I had the chance to go round some of the schools that I was working in, and I never saw one exercise book in there. I want to believe that, just as the Report says, sooner or later, the exercise books that are supposed to be there would be sent to these schools and they should be adequate
enough to help learning and teaching go on successfully.
Mr. Speaker, let me also talk about the non-formal education sector. We have talked about the number of recipients of this facility but we have to find out whether we have enough classes in the whole country that are catering for these, because I have done my own research and found out that we cannot even count about 20 classes that are catering for the number of recipients that we are talking about over here. If we are able to ascertain that we have such number of classes, then we would be justified to say that this money should be pumped into the system.
Mr. Speaker, I have seen something that
looks a bit odd, I stand to be corrected; that is, item 8.9. I have read that under MPs' Identified Constituency School Projects, it was observed that 5 million out of HIPC allocation -- I know HIPC allocation is HIPC allocation and we have something for education; why are we combining these? I stand corrected, but I think that HIPC should be taken separately and then GETFund or whatever that goes strictly to education should also be considered separately.
Mr. Speaker, we have heard a lot about Ghana Library Board and for that matter mobile libraries. They said they are operating in almost all the regions. Maybe, I need to go further to find out which areas they are operating in because for Eastern Region, I have gone through a lot of the places and I have not seen any of these operating. I need to be told in which areas these are operating.
Finally, Mr. Speaker, let me say that
the earlier we considered the teacher, the better for all of us. It is the teacher who has made all of us and it is sad for us to forget about the teacher. Whatever funding that we are asking for, the teacher should be paramount in there. And talking about the teacher, we are talking
