Accounting to Ourselves as Stakeholders in Order to Provide Quality Basic and Secondary Education in Ghana
Role of Parents and Parent Associations in improving Students Performance
a) Providing a safe and supportive environment by parents at home help to improve learning outcomes. Parents need to create a conducive environment for their children at home, by providing space and also less noise. Parents also need to provide support to children at home by helping them with their home and help them to draw private time tables for learning at home. Parents can support their children by checking their exercise books to see what they are doing well and where they fall short.
b) Parents can assist children by supporting them to do their homework or parents themselves giving them practice assignment. Parents could also involve other teachers to assist their children to revise their lessons or do more exercises.
c) Parents could open up to teachers by occasionally visiting the school to find out how the children are doing in school. Communication with teachers will help parents to support children to improve on their performance.
d) Parents should take part in educational activities. Parents should form or join the parents associations to find out ways in which they could cooperate and collaborate with the teachers and school management to improve learning outcomes. Parents could find out from the school areas they could help, such as textbooks, furniture, help schools to build fence walls and acquire leases for school lands to prevent encroachment on school lands. Parents could also support schools financially, to organise extra classes and write examinations. They could also be elected to join school management committees (SMCs) or board of governors.
e) Parents could advocate and lobby for support from central government, metropolitan, Municipal and district assemblies, as well as NGOs and other development partners for infrastructure and teaching and learning materials.
f) Parents are expected to monitor activities of managers and teachers of both public and private schools to ensure they are providing quality education for children of school going age.
g) Parents should take interest in who their children move with to school and play with at home. This is to check negative peer influence on their children.
