The Director General of Ghana Education Service (GES), Professor Kwasi Opoku-Amankwa, has debunked claims that more than 40,000 people resigned from the service last year.
According to him, only 293 staff resigned from the service in 2021, a figure which was in sharp contrast with the 44,000 bundled around by the Member of Parliament for the Builsa South Constituency, Dr Clement Apaak
Speaking to the Ghanaian Times in Accra yesterday, Prof. Opoku-Amankwa said the total attrition from the payroll of GES over the same period was 8,209.
He explained that attrition represented the number of staff who left the service either voluntarily or involuntarily and this included resignations, termination of appointments, dismissals, and some four other categories.
The figure, he said, comprised 6,834 teaching staff and 1,375 non-teaching staff.
Prof. Opoku-Amankwa said the right source to collect data on resignation and other forms of human resource attritions was the service’s payroll and not from the Education Management Information Service (EMIS).
He noted that at the beginning of the month, there were figures going round that 44,000 out of the 284,000 teachers left the teaching profession in 2021.
In responding, the Ministry of Education issued a statement, basing its statistics on the EMIS, stated that the figure was rather 34,424 instead of the 44,000.
However, Prof. Opoku-Amankwa said “Any attempt to use EMIS data to determine staff attrition would give a deceptive picture,” he emphasised.
Giving a regional breakdown of the attrition figures, he said the Ashanti Region came top with a total of 2,099, comprising 1,775 teaching staff and 324 non-teaching staff.
The North East Region, according to the figures, recorded the least with only 48 teaching staff and 15 non-teaching staff, bringing the total number to 63.
Similarly, the Greater Accra, Central, Western, Western North and the Volta Regions had 806, 837, 522, 139 and 555 attrition figures respectively.
Furthermore, the Eastern Region recorded the second highest number of attrition with 1,040. The Ahafo, Bono, Bono East, Savanah, Northern, Upper East, Upper West and Oti regions recorded 251, 256, 419, 87, 433, 348, 210 and 143 respectively.
By Cliff Ekuful
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