Mrs Elizabeth De-Souza, Northern Regional Director of Education, has expressed worry about the phenomenon where colleague teachers cover-up for absentee teachers.

She said some teachers had left for further studies without the consent of Ghana Education Service (GES) but were being shielded by some district officers and teachers.

Mrs De-Souza, who was addressing the opening of the 5th Regional Education Sector Annual Review in Tamale, said an exercise carried by the Directorate last year showed that, there were many vacant classrooms in the region.

Mrs De-Souza said, the results of the pay role audit would be used to fill the vacant classrooms with teachers.

“This time round we need all the stakeholders to corporate with the Directorate towards this exercise because often, some of them try to intercede for the teachers found guilty of such practice”, she said.

Giving an overview of progress in enrolment, she said, the Gross Enrolment Rate (GER) at the Kindergarten (KG) level increased from 89.3% to 98.4% whilst Primary GER also slightly increased from 93.2% per cent to 93.7%.

There was also a marginal increase at the Junior High School level, from 72.3% to 73.8%.

Mrs De-Souza said the increase in school enrolment could be attributed to interventions by the government and other non-governmental organization such as school feeding programme, free uniforms, free textbooks, free computers and the introduction of the capitation grant

She said to ensure effective and quality teaching and learning, a number of strategies including teacher deployment particularly to rural and deprived districts had been increased in order to ensure there were teachers in all classrooms at all levels.

In a statement read on his behalf, Mr Moses Mabengba, the Northern Regional Minister, said about 185 classroom blocks were being built in the region under the government’s schools under trees and basic schools rehabilitation programmes.

Additionally, he said the government was providing 30,000 dual desks to GES for distribution to all the 20 districts while some 10,000 bunk beds and 20,000 mattresses had been made available to senior high schools in the region.

The government is rehabilitating science resource centers in Bimbila, Nalerugu, Bole, Tamale, Damongo and Salaga to encourage the study of science.

Mr Mabengba appealed to the GES to step up monitoring and supervision of teachers.**