The National Inspectorate Board (NIB) has outdoored its revised handbook for the inspection of public and private pre-tertiary schools to enhance quality education.
The book contains new approaches and updates to streamline inspection procedures and enforce standards in order to improve learning outcomes.
At a stakeholder engagement in Accra yesterday, the Minister of Education, Dr Mathew Opoku Prempeh, said the NIB under the Education Act 2008, Act 778, is to provide independent external evaluation of quality standards in all pre-tertiary institutions in Ghana.
According to him, with the new Inspection Evaluation Framework (IEF), for a school to be said to have the minimum standard, is should be rated “satisfactory” on the NIB’s four rating scale, which includes outstanding, good, satisfactory and unsatisfactory.
“In 2019 to 2020 academic year, the NIB will inspect 2,381 schools across all 16 regions and so far, 448 schools had been inspected in the first term of this academic year,” he said.
In order to ensure a larger accountability pool and prompt decision making for quality education, Dr Prempeh said the inspection report with key findings and recommendations would be shared with a wider network of stakeholders.
He urged stakeholders to offer NIB the requisite support and cooperation to carry out its task.
The Deputy Minister of Education, Dr Yaw Osei Adutwum said NIB would continue the registration of schools from where the Ghana Education Service left off.
He said upon the passage of the Education Regulation Act, an authority status had been conferred on NIB
The Acting Executive Secretary, NIB, Dr Haggar Hilda Ampadu, said NIB would offer a diagnosis of learning conditions in schools and ensure schools were meeting the minimum standards of quality education.
“The IEF; new inspection approach of NIB, focuses on evaluating a school’s performance and its compliance with Ministry of Education requirements,” she said.
This approach she said was data-driven to ensure that the inspection data could be used promptly for decision making to improve learning outcomes.
By Agnes Opoku Sarpong
