The Minority National Democratic Congress (NDC) in parliament has taken a swipe at the government’s free Senior High School (SHS) policy that is taking effect today for what it termed stampeded implementation without exhaustive stakeholders’ consultations, claiming that that would eventually compromise quality of secondary education and sustainability of the policy.
At a hurriedly organized press conference yesterday, the minority leader, Haruna Iddrisu, said the Free SHS policy is not only benefitting selected few students, but also does not have sustainable funding base for its success since as of now, most headmasters and headmistresses have not received the funding for the smooth take-off of the policy today.
“By its inability to roll out free SHS to cover those in the second and third years, the New Patriotic Party (NPP) has only successfully vindicated those who said Akufo-Addo’s free SHS promise was a hoax,” the minority leader said.
He stressed that a total of 565,404 students in the second and third years would not be covered under the programme with a whopping 5,556 of new entrants who re-sat the Basic School Certificate Examination (BECE) also not benefitting from the policy, yet the NPP government made Ghanaians to understand that the free SHS was for all senior high school students.
The minority also indicated that with cabinet’s projection of about 85% of new entrants who would be placed in the various senior high schools now means the government has only made provision for about 362,781 SHS entering first-year, leaving out 62,711 new students who would not be covered under that projection.
“As we speak now, the NPP government has no Free SHS policy. There is no blueprint. No implementation manual and the absence of these crucial documents has not only exposed the government, but has also left key stakeholders like the Conference of Heads of Assisted Secondary Schools (CHASS), Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT), National Association of Graduate Teachers (NAGRAT) and the Coalition of Concerned Teachers (CCT) bewildered as they struggle to implement Akufo-Addo’s progressively free SHS,” the minority members said.
They wondered, “Now that the headmasters and headmistresses were crying that they have not received any funding for the smooth take-off, how would government expect them to secure supplies for food, uniforms, house clothes for boarders and other basic needs under unacceptable circumstances caused by the government that has a long tradition of poor planning and weak policy implementation?”
The minority leader said it was the same NPP government under former President Kufuor that extended the duration of SHS to four years without any preparations for its implementation thus, leading to its failure.
The minority also expressed concern about the centralized nature of procurement, which it thinks would lead to the loss of between 15,000 and 18,000 jobs for those who are engaged at all levels of the procurement chain as rightly indicated by the National Association of Institutional Suppliers.
By Thomas Fosu Jnr