Ensuring sustainability: It’s time to review free SHS - Varsity don to govt
A former Pro-Vice Chancellor of the University of Cape Coast (UCC), Prof. George Kwaku Toku Oduro, has urged the government to take immediate steps to review the free senior high school (SHS) policy through stakeholder engagement.
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He said the “very commendable” free SHS policy must be evaluated through stakeholder dialogue to ensure sustainability.
Speaking to the Daily Graphic last Saturday on the sidelines of the 40th anniversary celebration of Creator Schools in Tema, he said he found it strange that calls on the Ministry of Education to review the current mode of implementing the free SHS policy to ensure quality and equity-indexed education had become a political issue, with “review unfathomably” interpreted as a cancellation.
“I must, of course, concede that isolating basic education for quality without ensuring quality at the SHS level undermines the benefits associated with secondary education,” he said.
Prof. Oduro, a Professor in Educational Leadership at the Institute for Educational Planning and Administration of the UCC, indicated that in every human and organisational endeavour, there was the need for evaluation and review so that one could identify what was going on well, and strengthen that which was not going on well.
“There is no dictionary I have accessed which has defined review to mean cancellation. Review simply means evaluating processes or assessment of something with the intention of instituting change, if necessary,” he said and urged the Ministry of Education to think critically about the call for stakeholder engagement to look at the free SHS in order to put in strategies that would make the policy more beneficial to those who needed it.
Perspectives
“Unless as a nation, we put in place measures to bridge the gap between the disadvantaged and the advantaged, the rural and urban, we will not be improving, and our educational system will continue to suffer.
Let us put away politics and look at education from an education perspective,” he said.
Prof. Oduro said inadequate funding to support the policy resulting in delayed releases of funds and the lack of curriculum, among others, were some of the challenges facing the implementation of the policy.
“When you initiate anything, funding becomes critical, and at the early stages of the free SHS implementation, I called on the government not to hasten in the implementation of the policy, but rather define what the free actually means, who and who should benefit from that policy.
Now, funding free SHS has become very challenging and parents are now suffering,” he said.
He added that teachers were also suffering because they did not have time to rest and recharge their creative energies, rethink and modify their teaching methodologies, stressing that the current workload on them meant that they only prioritised teaching students how to pass their examinations instead of offering the students holistic training.
Writer’s email:Benjamin.