Government on Monday launched a school mapping and monitoring system portal under the Secondary Education Improvement Project (SEIP) to improve access to quality education.

The project, funded by the World Bank, is under the auspices of Ministry of Education and will provide sound information about public and private senior high schools through the use of Information and Communication Technology.

The project is part of government’s community day senior high project to increase access with equity and quality as well as improve management, research and monitoring and evaluation of school activities.

Professor Naana Jane Opoku Agyemang, Minister of Education, launching the project said it involved the development of a website to show the profiles of all SHS in the country and the geographical locations.

The Minister said the school mapping project uses a geographical information system to identify and locate SHS across the country and is being implemented in four phases.

She explained that the first stage is the development of a website, www.ghanaschoolsinfo.com while the second phase is the installation of a monitoring tool used to capture data from the schools and the third stage is the upgrading of the system to monitor activities and verify reports from schools and contractors.

Professor Agyemang said the fourth stage involves the collection of additional data from schools using the smart phone application such as submitting up-to-date photos of the school, mapping and creating profiles for newly created schools and creating monitoring templates and user log in details.

She said the school profiles will be marched to the mapping based on school codes used by the Educational Management Information System and that this will be done using an application developed for use on android smart phone.

She said the public could provide feedback or register their grievances by either sending a text message to a dedicated SMS number linked to the platform, and that the platform will continue to send email notifications until the issues has been addressed.

Professor Agyemang said the system was critical because it would inform decision making at the Ministry for planning and resource allocation in terms of the demography of the community, patronage, distances, facilities in the school and the performances.

Mr Richmond Atta Williams, Lead Team for the Mapping project, said the project was necessitated due to the lack of limited public access to school data, complex implementation aspects of civil works and large number of schools in different environments.

He said the system enhances efficiency as a single-stop real time mechanism to monitor progress of school improvement works, provide visual image to assess quality and monitor progress of scholarship disbursements.

Mr Atta Williams said so far 859 Senior High Schools both public and private had been mapped, with the school’s WASSCE rate, enrolment data, images, teacher to student ratio and the integration with social media to foster citizen participation and feedback.