In her speech at the 60th Anniversary and Prize-giving Day of the Seventh-Day Adventist Senior High School (SHS) in Bekwai in the Ashanti Region last Sunday, the Minister of Education, Professor Naana Jane Opoku Agyemang, said about 40,000 junior high school graduates were denied admission to advance their education in SHSs because of their inability to pay school fees.
She indicated that the charging of unauthorised fees by some second-cycle schools was one of the factors responsible for denying qualified students access to SHSs or vocational/technical schools in the 2012/2013 academic year.
Although we are not in support of the charging of unauthorised fees and support the MoE and the GES to stop that practice, we are of the view that there are many pupils and students whose parents and guardians are still unable to pay the streamlined fees.
That is because they are not able to make enough money to cater for the fees. This means that more needs to be done, so that more parents will be able to afford their children’s fees.
One of the approaches that could be adopted to address the issue of the difficulty in the payment of fees is the barter system, which has been employed effectively at Donkorkrom.
At the Donkorkrom Agricultural Senior High School (DASHS), the paying of fees has been made a lot easier with the adoption of the barter system.
Under the system, parents and guardians are not under any compulsion to pay school fees in cash because the school accepts foodstuffs, firewood and other essentials that it requires in place of the cash but which must be equivalent to the fees charged.
We believe that the system, which has been in existence for the past 15 years and removes pressure from parents to pay cash at all cost, is a very ingenious one that can be replicated across the country in communities where parents are peasants who only depend on farming for their sustenance.
While we admit that there may be an overflow when all parents decide to pay the fees in kind, we are of the view that the way around that will be to sell the excess for money to tackle those needs that require physical cash.
The Daily Graphic believes other innovations could be introduced by other schools, especially those in the rural areas where the payment of fees by parents is always a problem.
That way, more JHS graduates will be afforded the opportunity to receive education and not be barred just because their parents cannot afford the fees charged.
We also laud the plan of the DASHS to apply for approval to run courses in vocational subjects such as Technical and Home Economics, in addition to the Business, Visual Arts, General Arts, General Science and Agricultural Science that it is already offering but which do not enable many of their students to perform well.
We ask the MoE and the GES to promote such flexibility in our educational system, so that we will not only have more people educated but also trained in their areas of expertise.
