Accra, Oct.8, GNA-The Deputy Minister of Education, Youth and Sports, Mrs Angelina Baiden Amissah, on Friday said the government has spent 60 billion cedis to provide furniture for basic schools nationwide.

She said 50 billion cedis of the amount were spent on the three northern regions and the remaining 10 billion cedis in the southern part of the country, to facilitate teaching and learning. Mrs Amissah was addressing a group of 14 students of the Angel Educational Complex when they called on her in Accra on their return to Ghana from the United Kingdom after a 10-day educational tour. It was part of the school's exchange programme with Westhood Language College for girls in London to expose them to foreign education and culture.

Large quantities of textbooks had also been supplied to schools to improve the human resource base, to ensure economic improvement, the Deputy Minister said.

She was happy that the introduction of the capitation grant had doubled intake in many schools and announced measures to improve school infrastructure and to train more teachers to correspond with the increased enrolment.

The process of distributing the capitation grant would be monitored to ensure that the money got to the target groups by eliminating people she described as "captures"

Mrs Amissah urged parents to accept the computerised admission to Senior Secondary Schools as the best placement system as against the perception that it had frustrated them

She urged parents and students to liase with teachers in the selection of schools since it affected their future. The Free Compulsory Universal Basic Education (FCUBE) programme, she emphasised had been successful as against the assertion in some quarters that it had failed to achieve the desired objective 08 Oct 05