The National Association of Graduate Teachers (NAGRAT) has expressed worry over the government’s inability to resort to the trimester system used before the COVID-19 pandemic.
The comment from NAGRAT follows the release of the 2023/2024 academic calendar, which suggests that Form 2 and Form 3 students resumed school on November 1 and are expected to end the semester on March 5.
Per the transitional calendar for double-track students, Form One students will be in school from December 4, 2023, to March 5, 2024.
They will, however, return to school on May 13, 2024, until July 9, 2024.
They are due to go on break again on July 10, 2024, and reopen on September 3 up to November 15, 2024, when the academic year ends.
On the other hand, single-track students will report to school from December 4 until March 15, 2024, and go on vacation from March 16, 2024, to May 2, 2024.
The second semester will begin on May 3, 2024, and last until August 28, 2024, when the academic calendar will end.
The President of NAGRAT, Angel Carbonu in an interview with Citi News monitored by The Ghana Report, noted that the association may be forced to withdraw its members if the government fails to return to the trimester system.
“They are more confused than anybody. Because I can assure you, the Ministry of Education and the Ghana Education Service (GES), cannot tell you when the confusion will end. If we were serious, we should not admit the 2023/2024 first years into any double-track programme”.
“Then we can say certainly that within three years, all schools will come back to normal if we can discipline ourselves and say we want to end the double track in the next three years”.
“Let us not admit form ones into the double track, then I can say within the next three years in 2026, we will all end the double track for schools to run normally. But one thing I can assure everybody is that we will not continue to be working without rest periods. And a time will come when we take the rest period for ourselves, without resorting to management.” Angel Carbonu said.
