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John Dramani Mahama, the National Democratic Congress’s (NDC) 2024 flagbearer, has stated that he intends to review the Free Senior High School Policy (Free SHS) in its entirety within the first 100 days of his possible term after the general elections in 2024.
Mr. Mahama outlined his intention to form a committee of education specialists to create a better framework for the policy’s implementation and stressed the importance of a solid foundation in primary education.
On November 7, he stressed the value of a stakeholder summit that brings together education experts, educators, parents, students, and community leaders at a speech to the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in Accra.
Improving the Free SHS system and the standard of primary education would be the main goals of this summit.
“Within the first 100 days in government, we will convene a stakeholder summit that brings together educationists, experts, teachers, parents, students and opinion leaders to deliberate on how to improve the implementation of the Free SHS system and also improve the quality of our basic education,” Mr Mahama said.
The government of Akufo-Addo led the charge for the Free SHS policy in 2017. A review of the program has been requested by some stakeholders because of a number of issues, including budgetary limitations.
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Additionally, Mr. Mahama recommended that students in the regional bloc return to the West Africa Examination Council (WAEC) for assessment.
He argued that comparing student accomplishments to those of their peers in nearby English-speaking countries might reveal biases in Ghana’s evaluation and administration of local exams.
“We will return Ghana to the regional exams conducted by the West African Examinations Council so that it will be possible to compare the performance of our children with our English-speaking neighbours in the sub-region”.
“Right now, we write a local Ghana exam, we mark it ourselves, we mark our own scripts and we give ourselves high marks… If you don’t have any benchmark to compare, how can you tell you are improving?” he questioned.
