Mr Bright Appiah, the Executive Director, Child Rights International, a child focused NGO says any plans to review the Free Senior High School (SHS) policy to allocate cost to parents will defeat the universality of the policy.
Mr Appiah said, “once cost is assigned to the free SHS policy, it will become a failed policy.”
Mr Appiah in a press statement to the Ghana News Agency said, “the universality of the policy was advanced on the basis that the poor and the rich pay tax and, therefore, social policies must benefit them all,” the statement said.
It said there were policies meant mainly for the poor with 80 per cent of them strictly targeting the underprivileged – The Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty, School Feeding Programme, free uniform, free shoes, and capitation grants at the primary level.
“The only policy that is universal in nature is the Free SHS. Even though the policy design does not take cost from parents, an average parent is likely to spend Ghc 600 to Ghc 1200 in preparation towards enrolling children to school, ” it said.
The statement said further allocation would burdened parental preparedness towards their wards in accessing free education in the country.
Statistics from the Ghana Education Service revealed that 1. 6 million young people have so far benefited from the Free SHS programme since its introduction in 2017.
Most of the beneficiaries of the programme are children from deprived communities who before the implementation of the policy were idling at homes because of lack of finances.
The statement called on the Government to address supply of perishable and non-perishable goods to schools and availability of textbooks to aid effective teaching and learning.
It recommended that Government, as a matter of urgency, elevated all social intervention programmes aiding education into a statutory body to ensure sustainability, free flow of social policies, transparency, and accountability.
“Government communication in relation to social policies must be done in a manner that describes the policy as a social investment policy for better appreciation by stakeholders and beneficiaries,” it added.
The policy is a Government of Ghana programme introduced by the Presidential Administration of Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo in September 2017.
The policy’s core themes of access, equity and equality fulfils the United Nations modified Sustainable Development Goals, where member countries amalgamate those themes in their educational systems to certify adequate learning experiences for students towards long life learning.
Source: Ghana News Agency
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