Teachers who abandon the classroom after enjoying study leave with pay, at the expense of the tax payer, are depleting classrooms across the country, and should be denied jobs when they seek one in other public institutions, the Teachers and Educational Workers Union (TEWU) has said.
Government, the union said, should take the necessary steps to stop such teachers who, after being sponsored to undertake further studies, abandon their jobs and take up non-teaching jobs.
“Most teachers ask for and are sponsored to undertake further studies and, on their return, instead of going back to the classrooms to teach, they apply for and are allowed to get into the offices to perform functions which should be performed by the non-teaching staff,” the union said at a press conference.
The situation, the union said, does not help in the achievement of the goal of government to give quality education to the Ghanaian child.
“We call on government to take necessary steps to reverse this trend and get teachers back into the classrooms and allow our members (non-teaching personnel) perform their administrative functions.
“Why should teachers for core subjects like Mathematics, English, Social Studies, Integrated Science leave the classrooms and take up duties in the Metropolitan, Municipal, District, and Regional Education Offices as Human Resource or Personnel Officers whiles non-teaching staff in administration with qualifications such as first degrees and Master’s Degrees in Human Resource Management and Public Administration are put in registries to pick files?” the union said.
“Is this not mismanagement of human resource in the Ghana Education Service and a demotivation of administration officers in the GES,” it asked.
According to the union, per the scheme of service for the non-teaching staff of the Ghana Education Service, the role of public relations is a schedule for non-teaching staff but the management of Ghana Education Service has intentionally refused to train non-teaching staff for the job and instead encourages teachers to do courses in communication studies to take up that activity.
It said all these deplete the classrooms to the detriment of the education of the children in the country, notwithstanding the huge financial resources government puts into the sector.
Revision of conditions of service for public universities
The union said it is not happy that the conditions of service of the public universities, including that of the technical universities, have expired variously from 2006 to 2008 and up till date they have not been reviewed.
“We are pleased with the fact that the Fair Wages and Salaries Commission (FWSC) has initiated the process of reviewing these expired conditions of service. Due to some technical challenges, the process did not end last year. We trust that in this year 2018, by the end of the 1st quarter, as has been proposed by the FWSC, all efforts will be made by the Committee of Vice Chancellors and various Councils to ensure that we continue and conclude negotiations on the Conditions of Service for our members.”
