“Quality education of every child and young person must be our top priority. Education should not be for sale to the highest bidder, and access to quality education should be a right, not a privilege”.

“The objective of my educational policy is to lay a solid foundation for a sustainable, credible and efficient education system capable of producing the human resource needed to meet the challenges of the new millennium”.

“Building educational institutions that strive for excellence by international standards is not a luxury that developing countries can ill-afford. In a global world, it is a condition for survival and potential leadership”.

Professor John Evans Atta Mills

Public expenditures on education are always classified as current expenditures but they are also an investment in the future of the society. Thus, according to Professor Atta Mills, education (quality education) must be a top priority of any society that aspires to greatness, and public allocations to the sector must be protected as much as feasible. In any case, no child should be denied access to education due to lack of means.

Quality education will, however, not be realizable unless there are quality, adequately compensated, and motivated educators. This requires a holistic approach to improving education and specific policies addressing all levels of education (primary, secondary, and tertiary) with a focus on the institutions dedicated to teacher education and accelerated development of distance learning.

The primary objective of education is to produce the human resources needed to meet the challenges of the new millennium, wherever these challenges are found . In a global economy where resources (human, physical, financial) move to economic spaces where the opportunities are greatest, it would be a mistake to anchor our educational policies very narrowly on the human resources needed by the Ghanaian economy at a specific period of time. Some “brain drain” is inevitable, especially in a transitional period, when Ghanaian youth acquire the skills most needed by the world economy, and it would be foolhardy to seek simplistic approaches to halt the process. This is all the more so, since experience shows whenever a critical mass of expertise is developed in a given economic space, businesses do tend to relocate there to take advantage of these resources (India in Information Technology sectors, for example).

Private sector participation in the establishment of educational institutions is not only inevitable but desirable. The public and private sectors must be united in a “smart partnership” to create and implement a National Education Strategy. The private sector has a role in supplementing the public sector in providing quality basic education (literacy, science, technology, mathematics, and technical education) to those students who can afford it. Moreover, when it comes to the training in specific skills for industry, the private sector is better placed since such training must be demand-driven.