Free SHS Worsening Public Education …Former Vice-Chancellor

A former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ghana, Prof. Ernest Aryeetey, has said that the Free Senior High School (SHS) program is eroding the quality of public education at the SHS level.

Speaking during the 10th Dialogue Series organised by the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), Prof Aryeetey who is also the Secretary-General of the African Research Universities Alliance said that even though the haphazard program cannot solely be blamed for the plummet in quality of education, it is an outstanding factor.

“It is important to accept that the decline in quality of education did not begin with Free SHS. But Free SHS will make it worse. It is going to make it worse because the schools will never have the infrastructure that they need,” he said.

“And because they don’t have the infrastructure and teachers…the quality won’t come. If you want good schools, you spend money on them,” the respected economist said during the virtual conference on Thursday, April 28, 2022.”

The Free SHS is one of the Akufo-Addo government’s flagship programs but has been a populist mess after the government had rushed its implementation without really thinking it through.

The erstwhile Mahama government had begun the implementation of Free SHS by way of targeting brilliant but needy students with scholarships. Mahama had called his program ‘Progressively free SHS’ and had an outlook to gradually upgrade it into a full-scale free policy.

The Mahama government had however lost power in 2016, after which the Akufo-Addo scrapped Mahama’s program and implemented his own version of Free SHS.

The new President did not pilot the program in order to ascertain difficulties that could have come with the program. Soon, students were forced to camp outside of schools because there were not enough classroom spaces to accommodate them.

Then, matters went south when the government started implementing a shift system that would be derogatorily be called the traffic light system – in which students were put in batches and made to attend school in shifts with students spending up to six months at home and spending 3 months in school at a time.

Many educationists lament that the quality of public education has since plummeted thanks to the populist implementation of free SHS by the Akufo-Addo government.

Meanwhile, Prof. Aryeetey also called for a decentralization of school administration so that school boards get more leverage to administer the affairs of schools.