Another incident. Another committee. Another conference.
The cycle is now painfully familiar.
A sex tape leaks.
Students clash and destroy property.
A teacher-student relationship scandal breaks.
Public outrage follows.
Then the Ministry of Education announces a conference, stakeholders are gathered, recommendations are made, and we wait for the next incident.
On June 22, 2026, Education Minister Haruna Iddrisu announced yet another national conference for July 2026 to “identify the causes of indiscipline and propose solutions.”
Ghana does not lack research on school indiscipline.
We have decades of it. Studies spanning at least 20 years have consistently identified the same factors: family breakdown, weak community supervision, poor school leadership, inadequate teacher training, media influence, and lack of counselling.
Scholars such as Kwadwo Oteng Akyina and others in the Ghana Journal of Education and Teaching have already mapped the problem and proposed solutions: collaboration, counselling, context-appropriate rules, and parental involvement.
We also have a policy.
The Ghana Education Service (GES) Code of Conduct for Students (2024) sets standards, sanctions, and preventive measures.
We have a national module on “Essential Values for Ghanaian Youth” with training manuals, values learning communities, and weekly teacher training sessions with inspectors.
What we do not have is a consistent, funded, monitored implementation.
The problem is not that we do not know.
The problem is that we have chosen pretence and neglect over action.
Conferences are useful for agenda-setting and building consensus.
But when they replace implementation, they become expensive merchandising.
Ask the practical questions: How many headmasters, counsellors, prefects, parents, and students who live with indiscipline daily will actually speak at a centralised conference?
Wouldn’t a decentralised, school-based and community-based engagement yield more honest answers?
We do not have to reinvent the wheel.
Singapore uses the REACH model for early intervention. Finland runs a multi-tiered system of support.
South Korea invests heavily in school counselling, guidance programmes, and parental involvement.
These are not perfect fits for Ghana, given our cultural and resource differences.
But they prove one thing: lasting change comes from institutional systems, not from endless workshops.
We must benchmark, adapt, and implement — not admire from afar.
Here is the uncomfortable truth. Are our SHS students more undisciplined than the society that raised them?
They watch adults build on watercourses and blame floods on the government.
They see traffic laws broken with impunity.
They hear cheating celebrated as “smartness.”
They see low patriotism and zero accountability among adults.
Children do not learn values in a vacuum.
They copy what they see in homes, churches, mosques, markets, and on social media.
You cannot preach discipline in school on Monday and reward lawlessness in the community on Tuesday.
The time for more diagnoses is over.
The time for execution is here.
Government, GES, parents, and communities must shift to two things: agreed national values and intentional implementation.
Specifically: fully resource the GES Code of Conduct 2024. Don’t just launch it.
Train, monitor, and sanction non-compliance.
Compulsory guidance and counselling in every SHS.
Not as an extra duty for an overloaded teacher.
Hire full-time professional counsellors.
One per school, at a minimum.
Reinstate effective PTAs.
Stakeholders are right. Replacing PTAs with PAs weakened parent-teacher collaboration.
Parents must be partners, not spectators, in discipline and character formation. Annual disciplinary audits.
Every SHS should publish data: cases, interventions, outcomes.
What gets measured gets managed.
Character clubs in schools and communities.
Patriotism, discipline, and civic responsibility must be taught and practised beyond the classroom. Reject corporal punishment.
We understand parents’ frustration.
But whipping has long-term psychological harm.
We need scientifically proven, restorative discipline that protects children’s mental health while enforcing standards.
The indiscipline in our senior high schools did not “just pop up.”
It is a minor symptom of a much broader crisis of values, culture, and national identity.
For decades, we ignored it, hoping it would not catch up with us. It has.
The challenge before us is no longer diagnosis.
It is execution.
We must agree on the values that will guide all citizens, not just students.
Then we must live them.
When adults stop building on watercourses, stop cheating, and start obeying laws, students will have better models to follow.
Ghana’s youth are not lost.
They are watching.
Let us give them systems that work, adults who lead by example, and a country that rewards discipline instead of shortcuts.
Another conference will not fix this.
Bold implementation will.
The future of our schools — and our nation — depends on it.
