Reginald Quartey, the acting director of Curriculum at the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NaCCA), says the new curriculum for secondary education has inclusive pedagogy to help students with disabilities.
The NaCCA will roll out a new curriculum for secondary education in October 2024 to replace the current curriculum used in senior high schools (SHSs) across the country.
To ensure a successful introduction of the curriculum, which was currently being piloted in 33 SHSs across the country, the NaCCA held several stakeholder engagements to solicit inputs to fine-tune the curriculum.
At one of such engagements with teacher unions in Bolgatanga, Quartey, in an interview with the Ghana News Agency (GNA), said the new curriculum considered inclusivity with a focus on visually impaired and deaf students.
He said there was a mathematics curriculum adopted for visually impaired students to be able to study mathematics at the SHS level.
He said visually impaired pupils at the basic school level studied mathematics as a subject, but unfortunately, at the SHS level, they did not have the opportunity to study mathematics, “so currently, it is one area the SHS curriculum is looking at seriously.
“Again, NaCCA is developing a national sign language curriculum to be studied from the Basic School to SHS level. So, we are looking at the issue of inclusivity this time,” he added.
Quartey said the ongoing pilot programme would help identify loopholes in the curriculum before the final implementation.
“We hope that by the time the implementation will start, we will have plugged out the loopholes and make sure that we identify gaps and address them,” he said.
On how students would be assessed under the new curriculum, Quartey said the NaCCA would introduce a transcript system so that internal assessments by the schools would be registered and coordinated by both the NaCCA and the West African Examination Council (WAEC).
Professor Jonathan Fletcher, the founding dean of the School of Education and Leadership, University of Ghana, Legon, who took the teacher unions through key features of the curriculum, said the curriculum was entirely learner-centred and unique.
“It is the first time subject-specific philosophy and vision have been crafted, and so that is unique,” he said.
Professor Fletcher said the new curriculum would ensure that every child learns and develops to their fullest potential if exposed to the right environment and competent teachers.
He said the curriculum emphasised Ghanaian values, noting that it was not enough for students to concentrate on only their academic work.
“They need to develop an interest in our Ghanaian values like discipline, integrity, truth and patriotism,” Prof Fletcher said.
“We want them to develop leadership skills, so they become global citizens,” he said.
Ivy Betur Naaso, the Upper East Regional Chairperson for the Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT) told the GNA in an interview that with the right environment, and a well-equipped and motivated teacher, the curriculum would bring change from the old form of learning to a more critical thinking youth that would propel the country to another level.
She said the GNAT was concerned about the unfair benefits of the curriculum to students, “We know that we have category ‘A’, ‘B’ and ‘C’ schools. The curriculum is about a good environment.”
“The category ‘C’ students do not have that kind of environment, and they are introducing the same curriculum which is core to the teacher and students in category ‘C’ and core to students in category ‘A’. We see unfairness to the learner and teachers teaching in the category ‘C’ schools,” Naaso said.
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