The Ghana Education Service (GES) has been burdened with requests by some teachers, asking for changes in their dates of birth.
More than 800 staff has so far applied to the GES management to have their dates changed, since 2016.
While some wanted their dates adjusted upward, others have petitioned the GES to reduce theirs for reasons yet to be known by the service.
In an interview with the Ghanaian Times, on Monday, the Director General of GES, Jacob A. M. Kor, said his outfit was investigating various requests submitted to management before it took concrete decisions on them.
As a result, he said, the GES has put on hold request for any such changes, as part of efforts to manage the increasing number of the requests.
In a statement signed and issued last week, Mr. Kor, described the situation as “unprecedented,” and expressed concern about the surge in the number of GES staff petitioning the service for the changes.
According to Mr. Kor, this has “led to various movements from their stations to the district and regional education offices as well as the GES headquarters.”
Mr. Kor said, currently, “management had received and worked on more than 800 applications on change of date of birth alone, and this constituted a waste of quality time of management as it involved a great deal of scrutiny and referrals.”
He indicated: “hence, management has decided that, every member of staff of the GES should adhere strictly to the guidelines as regards the correction of date of birth stipulated for implementation by the GES council.”
Mr. Kor stressed that “with immediate effect, correction of date of birth for GES staff has been suspended in the district, region and headquarters till further notice.”
He urged regional, metropolitan and district directors of education to ensure strict adherence to the directive.
Mr. Kor, however, intimated to The Ghanaian Times that the rise in the number of teachers asking for the changes in their dates of birth could be as a result of error in biometric data collection exercise by the service, to collate data on staff.
He said there was a high possibility that staff wrongly inputted their information when the team gathered the data.
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(Via: CitiFM Online Ghana)
