Five graduates from Colleges of Education who obtained first class at the Diploma in Basic Education (DBE) Examination were presented with cash, certificates and lap tops for their excellent performance.
The maiden awards ceremony dubbed “excellence wards” was instituted by the Institute of Education of the University Of Cape Coast (UCC).
In addition the UCC had offered to award them scholarship to pursue degree programmes at the University and had therefore appealed to the Ghana Education Service (GES) to release them to enable them to acquire higher education for the benefit of the country.
No student had been able to obtain first class since the Post Secondary Certificate “A” programme was raised to a Diploma status in 2004.
The beneficiary teachers are Mr. Michael Nana Fynn of the Fosu College of Education who emerged the national best in DBE programme with a cumulative grade point (CGP) of 3.7 and received a laptop, a printer, a citation and a cash price of GHC 1000.00.
The four others who got GCP of 3.6 and emerged best students at the zonal level were Mr. Sebastian Kweku Agbedzordzi of Ofinso College of Education who was adjudged the best Untrained Teachers’ Diploma in Basic Education (UTDBE) for the Ashanti/Brong Ahafo zone and Mr Nathan Tetteh, best DBE of the Saint Frances College for the Volta zone.
The rest are Miss Florence Adom of the Saint Theresa College of Education the second best in DBE also from the Volta zone and Miss Portia Dufie of the OLA College of Education who was the best in DBE Central/Western zone.
They all received a laptop, citation and a cash price of GHC 500.00 each.
The Vice Chancellor of UCC, Professor Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang, expressed delight in the performance of the teachers and stressed that education in Ghana was an integral part of its economic development.
She said since its establishment some 50 years ago the UCC, which among others is charged to mentor all the 38 colleges of education together with two private ones, had carried its assigned role with zeal to help turn out quality teachers.
The Vice-Chancellor said the UCC’s Institute of Education continues to play a major role in teacher education and training through examination assessments, research and publication as well as carry out outreach programmes.
She said the UCC would continue to design and evolve programmes that would offer its products the unique opportunity to unearth the wealth of talents of all people and help cut the drop-out rates in schools.
Prof James Adu Opare, the Director of the Institute of Education, said the idea of establishing a special relationship between the Teacher Training Colleges and The Institute of Education (UCC) was to improve the quality of teaching and learning in the colleges to impact positively on basic schools.
He said since the upgrading of teacher training colleges, their performance had not been “enviable” at all and was optimistic that the awardees would be a challenge for teacher trainees to remain focused and work harder to excel.
Professor Joseph Ghartey Ampiah, Dean of the Faculty of Education who presided, said teacher development makes a big difference in the classroom adding that a trained teacher knows best how to impact knowledge into the students.
He said for the past years results had not been encouraging and called on all stakeholders to support the awards scheme to encourage more students to produce good results.
Source: Ghana News Agency
