In 2008, the Education Act, 778 established the National Inspectorate Board (NIB).
The main responsibilities of NIB are:
The National Schools Inspectorate Authority, formally known as National Inspectorate Board (NIB), according to the Education Regulatory Bodies Act(ERBA, 2020(ACT1023)) has the mandate to:
(a) Develop
(b) Publish
(c) Promote
(d) License all public and private Pre-Tertiary Schools
(e) Enforce;
the highest quality standards for quality education in public and private Pre-Tertiary Educational Institutions
NaSIA conducts school inspections through the deployment of its Inspection Evaluation Framework as documented in the Revised Handbook for the inspection of Public and Private Pre-Tertiary Schools in Ghana, 2019. The inspection approach has been revised to make it data analysis friendly. Every data point collected will lead to some form of decision making.
The NaSIA IEF has two main parts; Part (A) which focuses on elements, sub-elements and indicators that directly evaluate school performance. This is further categorized into three; School Leadership, Lesson Observation, and External Assessment Results.
The Part (B) evaluates school’s compliance with MoE requirements; Curriculum and Planning, School Management and Resources. Digitized data collection instruments have been developed for collecting this data at the school level for ease of data entry and analysis for decision making.
According to the Education Act 2008, Act 778 a school should be inspected at least once every 3 years. An inspection strategy which will see to it that each school gets inspected at least once every 3 years is currently being developed.
NaSIA conducts four types of Inspections:
A panel of Inspectors usually made up of a Lead Inspector and at least a Team Inspector, visit a school which lasts two or three days however longer if there are peculiar issues to look into. Inspections can be pre-planned or surprise based on prevailing conditions. All inspection data are collected in the field using NaSIA issued Samsung Galaxy Tablets.
A panel is expected to inspect 4 schools per week. Before a school inspection, the Heads, Regional and District Directors of Education are informed to ensure cooperation in the inspection process.
Upon completion of an Inspection, the panel meets with the Head Teacher for the purposes of feedback and to discuss preliminary findings and recommendations. The lead inspector will then leave behind a one-page signed summary report of key findings and recommendations. The inspection team will further discuss preliminary findings and recommendations with District Directors of Education and Circuit Supervisors. The panel then meets to adjudicate and reconcile their findings. The inspection data is entered into the kobocollect data collection system in the field before the panel returns to Head Quarters.
A data management plan which incorporates a data analysis plan based on International Conference on Harmonization (ICH) data standards has been developed. All data collected using the data collection forms in kobocollect are cleaned and validated by a data manager. A team of data analysts then pulls the data into a spreadsheet for further analysis. The Stata statistical software is used for the analysis.
The goal of this analysis is to be able to rate each school visited on the NaSIA 4-point scale of Outstanding (4), Good (3), Satisfactory (2) or Unsatisfactory (1).
Once this analysis is done, the data output will be given to the Lead Inspector of the panel to write a narrative to support the quantitative analysis. The Quality Assurance team will then quality control this report before approval by the Chief Inspector of Schools for dissemination.