Address challenges of free SHS before passing bill to Policy – CAPCOE

Mr Richard Kovey, the Convenor of the Campaign Against Privatisation and Commercialization of Education (CAPCOE), says passing the free Senior High School (SHS) bill into law in its current form is not the best. Mr Kovey told the Ghana News Agency (GNA) in an interview that regulating the policy and ensuring its sustainability would require addressing the challenges in the sector, which included feeding, provision of learning resources, infrastructure, and payments of grants needed to purchase some items for the school, among others. He added that the Government must also come clear as to whether the next leadership must partner with parents to ensure the smooth running of the policy and outlined the necessary steps needed to achieve that aim. 'If you implement a policy that says everything should be borne by the Government in its current state and then, in the future, you don't see the donor support that is being used to cater for some of the things, what it is going to mean is that schools would have to close down. Because, by law, parents are not supposed to pay anything and the government too does not have the resources,' he said. He suggested that parents whose wards were in boarding schools be made to pay for feeding, utilities, and other minor things. This, he said, would reduce the desire of people trying to send their wards to category A and B schools. The convenor of CAPCOE said that resources obtained from Category A and B schools could be used to improve schools in the other categories. He stated that basic schools were experiencing challenges because of the free SHS policy and called on the authorities to invest in the educational sector equally. Source: Ghana News Agency