The Executive Director for the Institute for Education Service (IFEST), Peter Partey Anti has called for the introduction of a shift system in schools to ensure social distancing in the classroom.

According to him, most of the schools across the length and breadth of the country do not have the full complements of PPEs, which in his opinion might lead to the mass spread of the virus because of overcrowding in classrooms.

“The students do not have the PPEs and they have gathered in their numbers in the various schools. In some classes they outnumber the number of desks in the classrooms,” he said.

He further called for the reopening of schools by the Ghana Education Service (GES) to be suspended until schools in all the districts are provided with PPEs before studies commence.

“We’re thinking that if the Ghana Education Service is not ready to get these schools the needed PPEs then they should suspend the re-opening and wait till they are able to distribute these things into the district for the district to forward it to the schools. Then they can ask the students to go to campus and pick their PPEs,” he said.

Mr Anti indicated that he had hoped that GES would have taken a cue from their experiences during the partial re-opening of schools last year and provide PPEs to the schools a week or two before schools resume.

“We were hoping that, since we were dealing with a smaller group of students, getting the PPEs to schools delayed and that is one of finding we had when we conducted our research. So we were thinking that they would have learnt from the experiences gathered during the partial reopening and would have sent the PPEs one week or two weeks before time,” he added.