Paramount Chief of Enyan Denkyira Traditional Area, Osabarima Otsibu VI, has launched a teacher development programme to commit a holistic attention to addressing the myriad problems facing basic education in the country and enable basic schools to create a ‘Whole-Child’ education’ process.
This GH₵2.1m, privately managed initiative, is a direct intervention from one of the most senior members of the Central Regional House of Chiefs, to address growing needs for youth engagement, emotional resilience and social inclusion within Ghana.
He is making official visits to every Embassy in Ghana to meet with officials, where he will call upon them to stand behind him to provide a solution which will support Ghana’s educational community to enrich young people through skilled educational activities, build emotional resilience and emotional strength which is so badly needed within communities.
“More needs to be done at the basic school level in strengthening education delivery in the country. Many schools are not performing up to standard, despite the government’s giant implementation of the Free SHS policy,” he said.
The Nananom Educational Development Programme is founded upon an internationally recognised approach to establishing centres of excellence in social emotional skills provision, by transforming existing educational environments by creating high standards, capability and the culture required within each school to build emotionally resilient children and young people.
It establishes a core of qualified specialists within the region, whilst also providing holistic continuing professional development for teachers to enable them provide on a “whole-child” educational process.
The programme is a partnership between the Nananom and SEDi (Africa), to utilise the SESA initiative as the learning, development and research infrastructure to transform schools into centres of excellence in social emotional skills provision.
It was officially launched in October 2017, and will support 259 schools within the Central Region: creating 200 teachers as specialists in social emotional development practice (through an internationally provided qualification pathway, which is regulated by Ofqual in the UK), and also providing continuing professional development for over 7,000 teachers across the whole in subject areas spanning emotional development, autism, adverse childhood experiences, mindfulness and social emotional learning.
SEDi (Africa) Director, James Kwesi Addison, said, “this programme is Ghana’s traditional leadership reaching out to the world, to bring-in the best training and support to now uplift how schools teach our children and young people to harness the power of emotion.”
“Our emotions are like fire: Left on the loose, they can bring on a great amount of pain and suffering – to ourselves and others. Feelings like anger, sadness, and fear can be overwhelming, and can quickly cause us to say or do things we later regret. But just as you can turn fire into a useful tool, these emotions can also be a force for good.
News Desk