Former President John Dramani Mahama has stated that the next National Democratic Congress (NDC) administration will review the Free Senior High School policy within its 100 days in office to deal with the barrage of challenges affecting it.
Speaking at a meeting with the leadership of Trade Union Congress (TUC) in Accra on Tuesday [Nov 7, 2023], former President Mahama said the policy had many challenges which called for a review.
He indicated that it would be one of the major agendas of the NDC government if voted into power to improve the policy.
The policy has been one of the flagship programmes of the current government offering opportunity to all students who qualify to attend senior high school education.
However, in recent times, it has come under many criticisms from the sheer population of students, the double system it necessitated and inadequate food supplies to feed the teeming students.
“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, who is also the flag bearer of the opposition NDC, said.
He indicated that the basic education was the foundation of education in the country and, therefore, must have a solid foundation.
The former President further indicated that the country would return to the West Africa Examination Council (WAEC) for assessment of students within the regional bloc.
“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,” he posited.
Mr Mahama indicated that the system whereby students wrote examinations set locally for the domestic students without having to be examined by WAEC was not helpful enough as it did not give a true reflection of the performance of the students as against their counterparts in other neighbouring countries.
“Right now, we write a local Ghana exam, we mark it ourselves, we mark our own scripts and we give ourselves high marks, and we tickle ourselves and we are laughing, that things are improving. If you don’t have any benchmark to compare, how can you tell you are improving,” he quizzed.
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