The Ministry of Education says teachers who absent themselves from the classrooms for a cumulative period of two weeks, will be dismissed from the Ghana Education Service.

The move follows fresh reports from the World Bank and UNICEF which ranked Ghana first in teacher absenteeism in West Africa.

According to the reports, teacher idling is the major contributory factor to the low performance of pupils and students in public basic schools.

But Deputy Education Minister in charge of Basic Education, Alex Kyeremeh says the situation will no longer be tolerated.

He told Joy News’ Seth Kwame Boateng that henceforth, teachers who stay out of the classrooms will suffer pay-cuts for the period they absented themselves.

“We have asked the head teachers to submit [a list of] those who absent themselves to the district directorate and the district directorate will forward the names to the Director General…to tick out the number of days they [teachers] absented themselves from school so that they will not be paid the number of days they absent from school.

 “We’ll build a dossier on them so that if they continue to do that for about two weeks then they will be dismissed,” Mr. Kyeremeh indicated.

The Minister said Government’s declaration of “Zero Tolerance for Absentee Teachers” has yielded significant results.

According to him, cases of absenteeism have seen a dramatic drop from 27 percent in 2013 to 11 percent in 2014.

He, however, said the sanctions will not apply to teachers suffering terminal illness as well as those with genuine reasons to stay out of the classroom.

“We are talking about attitudinal problems where people intentionally absent themselves from school,” he said.