Former President John Mahama has reiterated the call on President Akufo-Addo to complete the Community Day Schools he initiated to help absorb more students into senior high schools (SHSs).
Mr. Mahama averred that completing the over 100 of the E-Blocks would have solved the infrastructure challenges derailing the progress of the Free SHS concept.
He said the implementation of the Free SHS policy was rather political than national hence “Nana Addo and his government did not think through”
“Everything you’ll do, you have to apply wisdom. To start the free SHS, you have to know that when you open the gates like that, the children will be many and that means you have to make provisions for the students before opening the gates”.
The school blocks were commenced across the country to cater for the infrastructural deficits in the country’s SHSs while the government rolled out the ‘progressively free senior high school policy’. However, the Mahama-led government lost the 2016 elections, stalling most of the projects.
Mr. Mahama insisted that Nana Addo led government has not done enough to finish the projects and get students in SHS to study comfortably.
He made the comment in an interview on Bogoso-based Trinity FM, as part of his “Thank you tour” of the Western Region.
Commenting further, Mr. Mahama said the country’s education sector would not be running shift system when the E-Blocks were completed, appealing to the Chiefs and opinion leaders in the region to impress on the president to complete the E-Blocks to end the double-track system.
“It is a waste of taxpayers’ money. Today some of the schools have been left unattended. If they were operational, there wouldn’t be this double track”.
He believed that lack of quality infrastructure is affecting learning and teaching.
“The quality of education is declining and that is why the children want to rely on ‘apor’ (exam leakages) before going to the examination centre.”
He continued, “We have heard how students got angry after their final exams and went on rampage, attacking teachers because they did not allow them to engage in examination malpractices.”
To him, “if the quality of education in the second-cycle institutions is good and you train the children well, we won’t be seeing all these.
