Licensing & Guides

The new NaSIA Inspection Approach

In 2008, the Education Act, 778 established the National Inspectorate Board (NIB).

The main responsibilities of NIB are:

    • (a) to undertake the inspection of schools
    • (b) to evaluate on a periodic basis first and second cycle institutions and
    • (c) to set and enforce standards to be observed at the basic and secondary levels in both public and private educational institutions.

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


Goals

The main objective of Inspections is to ensure that the Ghanaian child has access to quality education in a safe environment. NaSIA provides a diagnosis of what a school must do to improve through bench-marking of the basic standards of education as stipulated by the Ministry of Education (MoE) and Ghana Education Service (GES).

Inspection Evaluation Framework (IEF)

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.



STATISTICAL SAMPLING STRATEGY

Sampling Frame

NaSIA selects schools using a statistical sampling strategy. For example, the sampling frame used for the 2019 School inspection is the list of licensed pre-tertiary educational institutions in Ghana obtained from Education Management Information System (EMIS) and Ghana Education Service (GES) as at April, 2019. The sampling frame contains information about the Region, District, District code, EMIS code, Names of schools, Status (Private/ Public), Educational level (Basic/ Secondary/Technical/Vocational).

Sample Design and Selection

Schools are considered as the unit of observation and the sampling unit, constituting the sampling frame. The clusters are defined as districts made up of schools. The cluster size (i.e. size of the district) is defined as the number of schools in the cluster. The sampling frame is stratified into the 10 regions and private-public schools, giving a total of 20 strata. The stratification ensures that data can be safely disaggregated into regions as well as public-private schools. For each stratum, the sampling is done in two-stages. In the first stage, districts are selected using probability proportional to size (PPS), meaning that larger districts have higher probability of selection compared to smaller districts. In the second stage, a fixed number of schools (both basic and secondary levels) are selected from each selected district using systematic sampling technique. The number of schools to be selected from each district is fixed to ensure that the PPS is compensated for in the second stage of sampling. Panel of NaSIA inspectors visit these schools and inspect only selected schools. There is no replacement strategy in order to preserve the representatives. The sampling weight is adjusted to account for non-response.

Types of Inspections

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:

    1. Whole School Inspection which are comprehensive and employs both Part A and B of the IEF to evaluate a school’s overall performance.
    2. School Performance Only Inspection which employs only Part A of the IEF to assess a school’s performance.
    3. School Compliance Only inspection which employs only Part B of the IEF to evaluate Ministry of Education compliance requirements.
    4. Investigative Inspections.

Inspection Process

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.


Inspection Follow-Up

Inspection findings on issues of health, safety, security, poor teaching and learning are generally prioritized and follow-ups will be done in 5 working days after the inspection visit through telephone calls. However, in crucial situations a panel could be constituted by the Chief Inspector of Schools to undertake these follow-ups. Issues could be referred to Education stakeholders such as the GES, Metropolitan-Municipal-District Assemblies and MOE who will then follow-up to ensure improvement.
DATA ANALYSIS AND REPORTING

Analysis of Inspection Data

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.


Reporting

The reporting turnaround time post-inspection is 10 working days after the last inspection day. Reporting will be done to our stakeholders.

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