Vice President, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, says one thing that interests him about Free Senior High School (SHS) policy is the gender parity in enrollment.

The Vice President made this known in a New African Magazine interview about the successes of the flagship programme in the education sector.

He said, “What is also very interesting is that more and more girls have gone into school. There used to be a lot of gender disparity – now there is gender parity between boys and girls in senior high school”.

Apart from gender parity, the policy has brought, the Vice President indicated that he is impressed with the performance of students who have been enrolled under the Free SHS policy.

The second thing that really has impressed me about this is that the performance of the students in the West African Senior School Certificate exams has also exceeded our expectations.

We were worried, because normally when you increase access there is a problem of declining performance – but what has happened is that performance has rather improved across the core six subjects. We’ve gone up from a 41% pass rate to a 64% pass rate,” he said.