Free SHS, seven years on
Seven years ago last Thursday, September 12, 2017, I joined the then Minister for Education, Dr Matthew Opoku Prempeh (NAPO), and the President for the launch of the Free Senior High School (FSHS) programme at the West Africa Senior High School campus in Accra.
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The launch was the culmination of six months or so of intense hard work at the Ministry of Education, with Dr Prempeh boldly leading the race against time to roll it out in time for the start of the 2017/18 academic year at the insistence of the President.
The meetings and consultations with leadership of various stakeholder bodies in the education sector were literally endless, sometimes running into evenings and weekends, with different perspectives, models and permutations under constant review.
The crowning moment, when it came, and against all odds in some sceptical minds, was particularly delicious, and it felt fulfilling to have played a small role in this grand enterprise.
Political trajectory, hard facts
The political journey to FSHS, from when the NPP first brought it up from a constitutional perspective and as an election campaign issue, is a matter of public record, even if others want to muscle in on the act and claim it as their loving baby despite having run multiple adverts against it and having badmouthed it at every opportunity in the run-up to the 2012 and 2016 elections.
By way of consolation, perhaps this is testament to the fact that despite its challenges, today the Free SHS programme is sufficiently attractive electorally and politically for everyone to seek to cash in on it, in the quest of harvesting juicy votes. After all, as they say, success has many fathers.
To better appreciate the import of the FSHS programme, it is perhaps appropriate to crunch some basic data that defined our education landscape in the years before it was rolled out.
Available data between 2013 and 2016 indicate that, on the average, 100,000 children, every year, passed the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) but could not take up their places in SHS, primarily because their families could not afford the fees.
This represented around 28 per cent of the total number of children who had been placed. In 2015 for instance, out of 415,012 students who passed and were placed, only 299,649 (72.2%) eventually enrolled – leaving a whopping deficit of 115,363 children falling through the cracks.
Of those who took up their places, about 22 per cent dropped out along the way, again due to financial reasons, mainly.
School heads were known to harass children whose parents had not paid their fees, which aside from the humiliation for such young, vulnerable students, must have affected their academic work in school. In despair, some simply dropped out.
What this meant was that if this trend continued for a decade, the country would have about one million of its youthful citizens whose education had not progressed beyond junior high school and who had no skill or qualifications even for low-level public sector jobs, where the minimum requirement is senior high school qualifications. That was the reality.
Double track
The decision to remove financial barriers to SHS education through this policy led to a surge in the numbers, which although good news, also presented the headache of finding space for them in our 721 senior high schools. The eternal question that arose was ‘whose child should stay at home for whose child to go?’
That is what led to the innovative Double Track programme rolled out in about 400 of our senior high schools with high student demand at the start of the 2018/19 academic year, in order to accommodate the numbers. Envisaged as a temporary measure of a five to seven-year duration, the programme is being eased out in many schools as infrastructure improves to absorb the numbers.
Current landscape, moving on
In 2018, 89 per cent of those who passed the BECE and were placed in senior high schools enrolled, up from 74.3 per cent in 2013 and 72.2 per cent in 2015. This jumped to 93.6 per cent in 2019, the highest since 2013, and has hovered between 88.5 per cent and 85.1 per cent since then.
At the end of 2016, the entire SHS population stood at around 800,000. By the time Dr Prempeh left office as Education Minister in 2021, the population stood at 1.2 million.
Today, it stands at 1.4 million and over five million children have benefited from it since its inception. These are incontrovertible facts.
Seven years on, whatever its challenges and the bickering, however one cuts it, the fact remains that it was a bold and visionary decision to roll it out back then, and I believe in the fullness of time, history will be kind to President Akufo-Addo.
It is easy to snort in derision at Free SHS from a position of privilege. Some insist on blaming the programme for literally every ill that has been present in our schools for years, from teenage pregnancy to general delinquency.
But beyond the bear pit and skulduggery of partisan politics and absurd point-scoring, there are many parents for whom this has been a lifeline. They are the majority of our people and they matter the most in this narrative because any serious government prioritises the needs of its most vulnerable and dispossessed.
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These parents will continue to tell their stories of hope and will help crystallise the defining issues of our national conversation into the election in December and long after the election season is over.
Happy birthday, Free SHS!
Rodney Nkrumah-Boateng,
Head, Communications & Public Affairs Unit,
Ministry of Energy.
E-mail: rodboat@yahoo.com