Teacher management and support systems in Ghana: the case of cape coast municipality

Abstract

The need to give support services to teachers throughout their career is being recognised as the only way to maintaining an effective teaching profession. The study was designed to ascertain the extent to which teacher support services are provided by the Chana Education Service and how the services influence teacher morale and job performance. Using Cape Coast municipality as a case study all the 340 teachers in the nine secondary schools, their headmasters and directors of education in the municipality formed the accessible population. About 72% of the teachers responded to the questionnaire served on all of them. The headmasters and directors were separately interviewed. Frequencies of responses were aggregated and converted into percentages to know what obtains with respect to GES support services. The study revealed that i. Ghana Education Service scarcely organises ill service training for school teachers. Subject associations, however, do organise refresher courses, seminars and workshops for their members. II. Except for the inadequate laboratory equipment, supply of teaching materials in the Cape Coast municipality is sufficient. Ill. Internal supervision of the Senior Secondary School teachers in the rnunicipality is negligible. External supervision is scarcely done. IV. Six kinds of financial support exist in principle but most teachers are unaware of any of them. Majority of the respondents considered the highly priced National Best Teacher Award as being inadequate to effectively motivate most teachers. Iv. Irrlernal incentive puckages, organis'ed by each schctol onrl its PTA, are more effective than GES attractive packages. Based on these findings some policy measures are suggested to ensure that adequate teacher management and support services are provided to boost the morale of teachers.