Free SHS: Govt failed to make proper stakeholder consultations before implementation – Educationist

Senior lecturer at the Accra Technical University, Dr. Daniel Osabutey, has stated that the Government rushed into implementing the Free SHS policy without consulting the appropriate stakeholders.

He believes this rush was as a result of the pressure from the opposition when the government assumed power.

He shared that if the necessary stakeholders were involved prior to the implementation of the policy, a lot of the challenges associated with the policy would have been averted.

He made these comments during an interview with Samuel Eshun on e.TV Ghana’s ‘Fact Sheet’ show.

“I always say that we never bothered to do proper stakeholder consultations in terms of involving major stakeholders because if you look at how the policy was even rolled out, NPP campaigned on free SHS so when they assumed power, then we had the opposition party asking them, ‘you told us you were going to implement the free SHS, we’ve not seen anything’.

So, I saw it to be more of fulfilling the campaign promise vis a vis the pressure that was coming from the opposition party and if they had taken their time to have really done proper due diligence, I think some of the problems that we are facing could have been averted”, he said.

Nonetheless, Dr. Osabutey praised the efforts of the government in introducing the free SHS policy as he notes that “it has helped parents who hitherto couldn’t afford the payment of school fees and other facilities”.

President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, as a flagbearer of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) since 2008, promised to make Senior High School education free. His promise was described by the National Democratic Congress (NDC) as unattainable.

But in 2017, the free senior high school education policy was introduced. That year, there was an 11% increase in enrolment, breaking records from previous years. In the 2017/18 academic year, a new record was set with the highest enrolment ever seen in the country: over 470,000 students enrolled in senior high school.