By: Kemo Kanyi
Dr. Habibatou Drammeh, Minister for Basic and Secondary Education, has outlined her plans to enhance students’ performance.
She was speaking in an interview with Coffee Time With Peter Gomez on Tuesday.
Dr. Drammeh explained that receiving data on a systematic platform will make MoBSE more efficient, saying “most of the information gotten, we converged heads of different departments, who manually presented their reports which is so broad to understand and to generate data, especially when swift actions are required for intervention”.
“To navigate through this, I decided to come up with an approach called ‘Path Way to Progress’. This is to leverage or harness the Education Management Information System [EMIS] that is currently available at the ministry, to make it more effective. In that, I want to make sure all students’ information is available on that platform, staff data, and resources of the ministry,” she stated.“The EMIS has the capacity to integrate/handle all these. We can develop a system that can help us monitor some of our vehicles for effective resource management,’’ she added.
The basic and secondary education minister said the education policy is very clear to them that they must basically ensure access to quality, equitable and inclusive education, adding that that cannot be realised without correct data.
“Students data will help us to know the performances of our students. We know the country is grappling with performance, specifically from 10 to 12 levels. Grade 12 results have not been impressive. So, we need to regularly monitor and know how well our learners are doing to make swift intervention. We can only do this when we see data. So, I think embracing this EMIS technology can help us make swift intervention,’’ minister Drammeh maintained.
Dr. Drammeh explained that she already engaged the staff of EMIS platform to ensure students access learning materials online, including textbooks, examination questions, sample answers, quizzes and other relevant materials, stating thatthis will improve the quality of education through performance because students will be familiarizedwith the questions and approaches to provide answers to them.
She also spoke about her intention to prioritize student-teacher ratio to align it with international standards, adding that performance of teachers will be recorded to know the training needs of everyteacher in order to realise improved students’ performance her ministry yearns for.
