The Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT) has called for a halt to the situation where fresh teachers of the Ghana Education Service (GES) have to wait for about 18 months before their details were fed into the payroll. Currently, the association said, none of the 2005/06 teachers posted to the Nkwanta District and 36 in the Hohoe District had yet been regularised. GNAT said the situation was causing a lot of embarrassment and had therefore, demanded from toe GES and the Ministry of Finance and the Accountant General's Department to institute a scheme, whereby newly posted teachers would be put on the right scale not more than two months after the release of their results. The Deputy General Secretary of GNAT, Mr John Noagbe, made the call at the end of a week-long in-service workshop for teachers drawn from the Volta Regional GES in Hohoe. The workshop, which attracted about 200 participants, was jointly organised by GNAT and the Canadian Teachers Federation (CTF). He said the effective delivery by their teachers in the classrooms would contribute to reinforcing their trade union's pursuit for better remuneration and other conditions of service. "It is in line with this thinking that we continuously inculcate in the entire membership the need to demonstrate consistently our commitment to the teaching profession, and all the laudable values it espouses-," he said. He said the end of the course marked the end of three 2007 GNAT/CTF project overseas in-service workshops for three regions. He said the first workshop was held at Wesley College, Kumasi, in the Ashanti Region with 191 participants and the SDA Training College in Koforidua in the Eastern Region, where 198 participants attended. In a closing address read on his behalf by the Hohoe District Chief Executive, Mr John Peter Amewu, the Volta Regional Minister, Mr Kofi Dzamesi, expressed hope that the workshop would help improve the appalling educational result in the region. He was happy that the workshop focused on English language, Mathematics, General, Science and Pre-Technical skills, for which percentage passes for the past five years was just 57 . He hoped this was one intervention to arrest the poor performance in the schools. Source: Daily Graphic