Free SHS is meaningless unless it is linked with skills development – Prof. Essuman

Professor Ato Essuman, Chairman of the West African Examinations Council (WAEC), has opined that free secondary education in Ghana will be meaningless unless it is accompanied by skill development for students.

Speaking at the 2023 edition of Achimota Speaks at the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences on Thursday, he said, “The argument about free secondary education is about access and not enough about the content and the outcomes expected. Matters about skills development, teacher orientation, reorientation and training and development as well as new pedagogical approaches are less stressed.

"Clearly, fair attention to all these is likely to produce students ready to transition either to the tertiary level or the world of work.

“The policy of making secondary education free and available to all is a lofty one but such a goal will be useless and needlessly expensive if all it does is to create opportunity and give young people access without the skills that will make them great assets for the nation development or otherwise, the problems would continue to compound.”

The theme of the event was “The Governance, Management, and Financing of Secondary Education in Ghana.”

Prof. Essuman, the Dean of Education and Entrepreneurship at Methodist University College in Ghana, also bemoaned the policy’s poor implementation.

“Implementing free secondary education in Ghana may have been desirable if a gradualist approach and phased implementation of the program had been adopted. Learning from other countries’ experiences may have led to better management of the policy.

“With the problem of inadequate resources and delays in funds released to schools, a strategy for mean testing to target the poor and the vulnerable could have been adopted. I do not think that as a country we have many options.”