GHANA seeks to transform its educational sector to make it a catalyst for achieving national developmental aspirations, Yaw Osei Adutwum, the Minister for Education has stated.
Adutwum said during the five-day National Education Week celebration that ongoing reforms in the educational sector would enable the country produce graduates that companies are eager to employ, Koku Devitor reports.
He added that the growing graduate unemployment rate in the country was partly the responsibility of the educational sector.
‘As an education ministry, we produce graduates and expect companies to absorb them. But are we producing graduates fit for purpose; are we producing graduates that companies can’t wait to hire? That is the question for the Ministry of Education. We cannot run away from graduate unemployment,’ the minister stated.
The minister alluded to the fact that companies in Ghana were looking for graduates in actuarial sciences, but the universities were not training enough of such graduates.
‘Graduate unemployment is something for which education should take responsibility. The education ministry should tackle graduate unemployment, and we are ready for it. We have to be ready for it,’ he said.
Adutwum added that ‘Companies in Ghana are beginning to look for mathematicians. We are not training enough. We have to begin to look at the misalignment. The misalignment between the ones we produce and the ones the market wants must end.’
In the end, he said graduates from universities should not be those who only memorise the notes of their teachers to pass their examinations. But we need graduates who can carry out assignments given by their employers with excellence.
‘General education must include logic and reasoning so graduates can reason. I want to see a day companies go to our universities to recruit, because that is the best recruitment ground in the world. Companies flock to university campuses and recruit from there,’ the minister added.
Adutwum said ongoing reforms in the educational sector, including the retooling of Technical and Vocational Education and Training, Science, Technology and Engineering and Mathematics education and the reforms in the tertiary education were going to transform the educational sector into one that produces graduates fit for purpose.
The educational reforms, he said, were to ensure that the lower levels of education produced the right students for tertiary level and the tertiary level also turned out graduates ready to lead economic transformation and national development.
‘The better days of our nation are ahead of us. But for that to take place, education has to play its role as the most important agent for the socio-economic transformation,’ the minister stated.
‘And once we repurpose and fine-tune the education system, and produce graduates that can lead national development, we would be able to leap to the land of transformation,’ he added.