Vice President, Papa Kwesi Amissah-Arthur at this year’s National Teachers’ Awards Ceremony, has called for innovation and changes in teaching methodology to reflect current global labour requirement.

He said teachers in these modern times were not training pupils only for the Ghanaian market but also for the globe.

“You are no longer simply training a Ghanaian citizen or a Ghanaian worker and global citizens, your method of teaching has to change to reflect a new kind of student in the new kind of world,” the Vice President said at the Jubilee Park in Kumasi on Friday.

The awards ceremony is the 18th Edition for teachers and 85 teachers as well as volunteers from 13 categories in the pre-tertiary sector were rewarded for their excellent contribution to teaching and educational development in Ghana during the last year.

Vice President Amissah-Arthur said the world in which teachers imparted knowledge had now changed tremendously due to advance in Information Communication Technology (ICT) and transportation and pledged government’s support in ICT education by providing all Junior High Schools (JHS) and teachers with laptop computers.

“Just last week, Parliament approved a proposal to set-up computer laboratories and ICT learning centres in 250 Senior High Schools (SHS). This, government has been standing by teachers to making teaching and learning easier,” Vice President Amissah-Arthur said.

He observed that the chances of a nation achieving accelerated economic growth now depended more on its educational system than the volume of its mineral resources and land size.

“This reality dictates a new development strategy that puts the creation of a high quality educational system that produces a high calibre human resource at the centre of any development strategy. In today’s world, we teachers have become the keys to unlocking the wealth of nations,” the Vice President said, and pledged government’s commitment to the improvement of education in Ghana.

Apart from investing almost a quarter of the national budget in education, the Vice President said, government had also built 1,200 new basic schools to create a better working place for the teacher.

Government also feeds about 1.6 million basic school children as compared with the 440,000 in 2009 when the governing NDC took over.

Government had not only added 3,000 classrooms at the SHS level since year 2009, it had increased subsidies to SHS from GH¢18 million in 2009, to GH¢48 million in 2012.

Additionally, he said, two more public universities had been created in the Brong Ahafo and Volta Regions where there were none previously.

The Vice President said government was commitment to quality education and that it was pursuing a policy on progressive free SHS education.

He announced that 200 new community SHS would be established in the next four years.

He appealed to teachers to reduce the incidence of absenteeism in the classroom.

Vice President Amissah-Arthur congratulated teachers on their hard work and urged them to rest on their oars in order to accelerate the development of the nation.