Por un acceso radical a la cultura

ECEC in Ghana are provided by both the public and the private sector. In the public sector, the schools receive all their funding from the state or local authorities and their services are supposed to be ‘free of charge’, which include tuition, materials and feeding in some areas. By contrast, the private sector which includes private organizations, individuals and religious bodies are both privately managed and funded by these individuals and organizations with very little influence from the state. The state influence on these private institutions is in the area of the school curriculum.

The costs of service provided by these private institutions are borne fully by the parents of these children (Tooley et al., 2007). The private institutions charge higher fees and are able to provide

better conditions and opportunities which enrich the children’s learning experiences to a larger extent than in the state institutions (Asare, 2004). For instance, there are more play facilities both in numbers and types, providing better indoor and outdoor environment with better organized play spaces which creates enough room for children to move about to explore their environment (Asare, 2005).

5.2.1 General Conditions of the Preschool understudy

I chose a private early childhood institution which is a preschool for my study and this is due to the recent influx of private preschools in the city of Accra which are designed purposely to attract the lower class in society. During their consultative meetings on the development of an ECD policy for Ghana, it was pointed out that, the high concentration of private preschool in urban communities like Accra means that children from poor household will be denied entry (GNCC, 2002 as cited in Sackey, 2009 p.22). However, the Oxfam Education Report noted that, for developing countries in general, the notion that private schools are servicing the needs of a small minority of wealthy parents is misplaced because a lower cost private sector has emerged to meet the demands of poor households (cited in Tooley et al., 2007 p.391).

The state of the private preschool I chose for my study was not in no better condition than the public preschools available in the City. The school is built with cement blocks. The whole school buildings are three classrooms, a staff common room and a proprietor’s office. It is fenced with vertical pieces of wood and has two gates, one in front of the building serving as the main entrance and the other on the right side of the building. The building has design blocks with holes in the front and back of each of the classrooms which serves as windows to each classroom.

The school is painted with orange and white emulsion paints. It has a relatively small playing ground compared to other private preschools. The school has a big mango tree that provides shades for the children, especially during sunny days. There is a special uniform for the children in this school unlike the state owned schools that wear the same kind of uniform all over the country. The girl’s wears striped green and white skirt with a plain white top whiles the boys wears plain green shorts with stripped white and green shirts. The medium of instruction and communication in the school is English but the local language (Ga) is used alongside when the

need arise. There are three classrooms for the children namely; crèche (0-2years), nursery (2-3years) and kindergarten (3-5years). These ages for the various classrooms are the official age but the children in the school I did my fieldwork have grown pass these age groupings. Children in the crèche are between the ages of 1-3years, nursery 3-5years and kindergarten 5-8 years. This is in line with the observation made by Akyeampong et al., (2007) that though the official age for children to start primary school in Ghana is 6years, the mean age at which they start school is 7.5years. This estimated age includes late entries, old-age entries and repeaters due to non-performance (ibid).

The total number of children in the school is 110 out of which 52 were girls, revealing a fairly balance enrollment of boys and girls. This was normally not the case as more boys were enrolled than girls but the recent campaign for girl child education has really got down to the people and most girls are now enrolled in schools. The school has a proprietor, and 2 non-teaching staff who serve as cooks in the kitchen. The teachers in the school were 6 and all of them were females.

This confirms the assertion that the field of early childhood education is challenged by gender bias worldwide and assumes that only women are suited to caring for the young ones (Jalongo et al., 2004). All the teachers in the school were untrained with the exception of 2 of them who were trained. The child-teacher ratio in the kindergarten class is 24 children per teacher and that of the nursery and the crèche was about 15 children per teacher. This is within the requirement of Ghana Education Service (GES) and the Department of social welfare (DSW) regulation that the kindergarten class and both the nursery and crèche should not exceed 1:35 and 1:25 respectively (Asare, 2005). The fees the school charges per term is GHC 80 (NOK350) which looks quiet moderate compared to other private school in the area which charge from GHC 150 (NOK500) and above. The floor of the classroom is cemented unlike the school compound. The school has no electricity and standpipe to provide water for the children. The teaching, learning and play materials in the school were few. These included black boards, chalk, crayons, exercise books, syllabus and football. However, the school had considerable form of First aid kit containing paracetamol, cotton wool, detol antiseptic, gention violet, plasters and penicillin ointment. The school has a bell which is hanged on the door of the kindergarten classroom. There was only one toilet available which is for the teachers. The children especially those in the kindergarten class

use the chamber pot which is placed in a carved wooden structure. There were about eight chamber pots serving as toilet facilities for the children.