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Free SHS starting next year
Making senior high school (SHS) education free was a major part of Nana Akufo-Addo’s campaign platform. Now, a month into his presidency, Akufo-Addo is doubling down on his promise. On Saturday, speaking at the 60th anniversary celebration of Okuaperman School in the Eastern Region, Akufo-Addo said that “the government of Ghana will fund the cost of public senior high schools for all those who qualify for entry from the 2017/2018 academic year onwards.” He went on to elaborate:
“By free SHS we mean that in addition to tuition which is already free, there will be no admission fee, no library fee, no science center fee, no computer lab fee, no examination fee, and no utility fee; there will be free text books, free boarding and free meals, and day students will get a meal at school for free. … Free SHS will also cover agricultural, vocational, and technical institutions at the high school level.”
Undoubtedly there will be several people wondering aloud about Ghana’s ability to take on this financial burden. During the campaign, the NDC often harped on this: sure, it would be great to have free SHS, but it isn’t financially feasible, they would argue. And that was before a larger than expected budget deficit was made public. Given the challenging budget backdrop, Akufo-Addo certainly has his work cut out for him. Hopefully it works out. Akufo-Addo closed his speech with some encouraging remarks that are worth repeating:
“I want every Ghanaian child to attend secondary school not just for what they learn in books, but for the life experiences that they will gain. I want each of them to look in the mirror in the morning, every morning, and know that they can achieve anything they dream of when they complete their studies. … I want them to be confident that what they study is relevant to the demands of today and tomorrow… I want every Ghanaian child to be comfortable in the knowledge that when they work hard, they are as capable as anyone else in the world… And I want parents to look upon their children with pride as they watch them mature into self-confident adults.”
Out with Arabic, in with French
In November, there were talks of making Arabic a compulsory subject in the national curriculum. A couple months later, French has now become the language likely for inclusion. Dr. Matthew Opoku Prempeh, Minister for Education, has made known the government’s intentions to make French compulsory at the basic level. French is already offered at the JHS and SHS, but Prempeh hopes that adding it to the basic level will help build a stronger foundation for what the government has embraced as its second foreign language behind English. All things considered, emphasizing French makes a fair amount of sense and is good for tighter regional integration, given that Ghana’s neighbors are all Francophones.
Emphasis on STEM
While the free SHS promise remains to play out, it looks like another piece of Akufo-Addo’s campaign platform has gotten underway: prioritizing technical education. Minister Prempeh has reactivated a project to build and equip laboratories in various technical institutions with the necessary equipment to train as many as 10,000 young Ghanaians in a host engineering disciplines.
GES wants info on dilapidated school buildings
The Ghana Education Service (GES) has called on all regional and district directors of education to survey and disclose all dilapidated school buildings and schools under trees in their districts. The call for building data is in response to the tragic incident that resulted in the death of six kindergarten students.
Also…
Tigo, a mobile network operator, is encouraging stakeholders to get more involved in making the Internet a safer place for children in Ghana.
Two NGOs (the Mprego Needy Foundation in Kumasi and the Adesuapa Foundation in Hamburg, Germany) have teamed up to help out teachers through various projects in the Ashanti Region.
Dr. Stephen Adei: education is the key to national development. He separately called for the firings of non-performing teachers in public schools.
Members of Parliament got into an entertaining argument over which SHS is the best in Ghana.
A parent forum in the Sunyani Municipality resulted in troubling testimonies about unauthorized fees being charged in some basic schools.