The Ghana Education Service (GES) is actively working to improve on the working conditions of teachers in the country to facilitate the effective implementation of the new educational reform. The officer in charge of Human Resource Management of the GES, Mampong-Ashanti, Mrs Beatrice Bioh, said this at a central committee meeting of the National Union of Ghana Students (NUGS). The meeting brought together students from all parts of the country to discuss matters such as the new educational reform, the Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETFund), and the Student Loan Trust Fund (SLTF). Mrs Bioh said the government was aware the central role that teachers had to play in the implementation of the reform, saying that everything was being done to ensure that teachers were adequately motivated. Responding to concerns that teachers at the early childhood development level were not well trained to impart the requisite knowledge, Mrs Bioh said teachers employed under the National Youth Employment Programme (NYEP) to teach at that level were being equipped with the requisite skills for that area. Some of the participants called on the GES to find ways of monitoring teachers. The Head of Department, Animal Science Education of the University of Education, Winneba, Mampong campus, Prof. K. T. Djang-Fordjour, said the concerns that adequate facilities ought to have been put in place before the introduction of the reform were unfounded, arguing that it was practically impossible and unreasonable to with¬hold the reform until all the necessary facilities were in place. "If we were to wait until we had got all the buildings and other structures in place before taking off, we would never have started," he stressed. Prof. Djang-Fordjour said the reform was necessary as it was meant to correct the deficiencies in the old educational system to make education relevant to the development needs of the country. The NUGS President, Mr Kweku Tuoho Bombason, expressed concern about the negative public opinion about the union, and gave the assurance that the current groupof leaders were determined to repackage the union to make it more relevant to the present development needs of the country. Mr Bombason was also not happy with what he called unnecessary harassment of national officers of the union by certain interest groups in the country whenever the union took a stance on a critical national issue. That, he said, did not augur well for the expression of true democratic values in the country. He wished all Muslims in the country a successful Eid-Ul-Adha celebrations and appealed to the government and the Interim Management Committee of Hajj to work hard to find a lasting solution to the perenni¬al problems that pilgrims faced. The Co-ordinating Secretary of NUGS, Mr Vitus Gbang, said the major problem facing the union was the lack of a permanent secretariat, adding that the leaders had been without an office accommodation since they took office on October 4, 2007. Source: Daily Graphic