TECHNICAL, VOCATIONAL TEACHERS ATTEND WORKSHOP (PAGE 61, NOV 15, 2010)

A two-week capacity building workshop for 30 technical and vocational teachers and policy makers has opened in Tema.
The workshop, which is being organised by the Department of Education, Culture, Science and Technology of the ECOWAS Commission, is also intended to update the knowledge of the participants on employable skills and enhance technical and vocational education locally.
The ECOWAS international resource person, Mr Joshua Mallet, said the programme was the first to be held in Ghana, although it had been going on in other ECOWAS countries .
He was hopeful to see a competency-based technical expertise that would fit into the growing industrialisation of member states .
Mr Mallet said Ghana was the only African country which had a council for Technical, Vocational and Educational Teachers (TVET), which is an indication of the government's determination to make education a priority .
An Assistant Director of Education at the Ministry of Education, Tertiary Division, Mr Cephas Adjei-Mensah, said the government had fashioned out a new policy to promote technical and vocational education and training as a way of skills development.
He said that vision had been articulated in various documents, including the Ghana Poverty Reduction Strategy (GPRS) 2003 - 2005, the Education Strategic Plan 2003-2015 and the government’s White Paper on the report of the Education Review Committee (2004) .
Mr Adjei-Mensah said the TVET policy framework of Ghana recommended that competency-based training (CBT) be delivered to serve as a model to all TVET programmes .
He said that curriculum development experts, skilled instructors and competent teachers with workplace experience would serve as the cornerstone to the acquisition of employable skills by all categories of learners.
He underscored the critical role of TVET and called for the institutionalisation of training of trainers and continuous development programmes for technical teachers within national TVET systems.