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A senior lecturer at the Department of Population and Health of the University of Cape Coast (UCC), Prof. Kofi Awusabo-Asare has observed that the newly introduced Community Day Senior High Schools (SHSs) will not work if government does not incorporate them into the national agenda.
He believes the community day schools will not survive beyond a 10-year period because the programme was not a well-thought out national plan.
Speaking to journalists after a presentation on the Computer Schools Selection and Placement System (CSSPS) in Kumasi, Prof Awusabo-Asare said the community day SHS programme appears not to have been rolled out on the basis of research, adding that history would have guided the policy implementers that day schools do not work in the country.
“Apam Secondary School was set up as a day school, but it was later converted to a boarding school because of what happened,” he pointed out and asked the country to learn from such experience.
The senior lecturer added that “we don’t study things and when someone says something we pooh-pooh it as being bookish. But that is how societies learn. Nobody is prepared to put in money to look at why it didn’t work and then we can do to correct the system.
The university don said the time has come for Ghanaians to sit down and develop a national plan on education in order to stop unnecessary interference from political actors.
Prof Kofi Awusabo-Asare
He said the four-year SHS system, as recommended by the Anamoa Commission, would have been superb if the government had not rejected it due to political expediency and reverted to three years.
On the CSSPS, Prof Awusabo-Asare indicated that the SHS system should be made autonomous of the national system, while the country agrees on the distribution of 30 percent quota for the district and other stakeholders, including the faith-based organisations.
He was speaking at the 36th Annual National Conference of the Association of Catholic Heads of Higher Institutions (ACCHHI) under the theme: ‘10 Years of CSSPS Operation – Effect on the Stakeholders and the Way Forward.’
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The learned professor called on the religious bodies to be proactive by coming up with programmes to improve the education sector.
In his view, this would help deal with challenges of CSSPS that was implemented in 2005.
National President of ACCHHI, Rev. Fr. Michael Elorm Gbordzor, on his part, said the education sector in Ghana was currently faced with serious challenges and there were several questions begging for answers.
He mentioned inadequate supply of textbooks, inadequate training materials for technical and vocational institutions, among others, as some of the problems facing the education sector.
He called on government to pay attention to proposals from bodies such as ACCHHI.
From Ernest Kofi Adu, Kumasi
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