Despite thousands of children attending low-fee private schools in northern Ghana, the lack of a coherent policy framework to govern these schools has hindered the government’s ability to support and provide oversight to them. As part of the USAID-funded Advancing Partnerships for Improved Learning Activity, R4D is working with the Government of Ghana (GoG) and private school associations in northern Ghana to improve the policy environment for low-fee private schools and to strengthen the government’s capacity to monitor and support them.
Advancing Partnerships for Improved Learning is a U.S. Government-funded Activity in partnership with the Ministry of Education to enable proprietors, teachers, communities, financial organizations, professional networks, and the GoG to improve student learning outcomes and financing options for low-fee schools over a five-year period (Feb 2023 – Feb 2028) in the Northern, North East, Upper East and Upper West Regions of Ghana.
The Activity is being implemented by Opportunity International in collaboration with a consortium including Results for Development (R4D), the Ghana National Association of Private Schools (GNAPS), Ghana National Council of Private Schools (GNACOPS), University for Development Studies (UDS), and FHI360.
The Challenge
Thousands of children who attend low-fee private schools in northern Ghana rely on the government to ensure they are receiving quality education. While there are many agencies overseeing the sub-sector of pre-tertiary private schools — the National Schools Inspectorate Authority (NaSIA), the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NaCCA), the National Teaching Council (NTC), and the Ghana Education Service (GES) — there is currently no coherent policy framework that explicitly states which agency is responsible for what. Government oversight of private schools is also constrained by insufficient resources. Monitoring and oversight mechanisms are not feasible to implement in practice because of constraints including limited staff, onerous requirements that are unaligned with the monitoring/oversight capacity available, and too large an oversight area per staff member.
In addition, there are not clear guidelines for how a low-fee private school should be run and regulated, making it difficult for these schools to understand and work to meet expectations. Ultimately this is a disservice to the children (often among the marginalized) who attend these schools.
The Opportunity
Given the ever-growing number of Ghanaian children in low-fee private schools, there is an increasing recognition of the need to support quality improvement in these schools. For the GoG to successfully support the improvement of low-fee private schools, an overarching policy framework is needed. Within it, there is an opportunity to develop fit-for-purpose policies around key issues such as school registration, teacher certification and retention, adherence to national standards for curriculum use, in-service training, taxation, and access to teaching and learning materials.
The recent transfer of monitoring and oversight responsibility to NaSIA also offers an opportunity for rethinking the approach, aligning it with available resources (and determining whether additional resources are needed) and for creating a monitoring/oversight policy that is practical to enforce and implement over time.
R4D’s Work
As part of USAID’s Advancing Partnerships for Improved Learning Activity led by Opportunity International to support low-fee private schools in northern Ghana, R4D is working with the Activity’s consortium of local partners to:
- Improve the policy and regulatory framework governing low-fee private schools
- Strengthen the capacity of government agencies to monitor and oversee low-fee private schools
The five-year Activity will adopt a collaborative approach to developing a policy improvement agenda, an adaptive learning methodology to test and tweak appropriate tools (school monitoring form for example), and a coaching approach to ensure ownership and capacity building within GoG agencies.
R4D’s work, along with activities lead by consortium partners, aims to improve the quality of education provided by low-fee private schools in northern Ghana, supporting over 2,130 teachers with regular professional development training and coaching and over 52,000 students with an improved quality learning environment.
