The Minister of Education, Dr Matthew Opoku-Prempeh, has stated that the double-track system that the government introduced in 2018 in Senior High School (SHSs) was necessary to give voice to the President’s vision of Free Senior High School (SHS) education.
Dr Opoku-Prempeh made this declaration when he addressed this year’s National Education Week currently taking place at the Accra International Conference Centre under the theme ‘Reforming the Education Sector for Effective Service Delivery: Assessing Progress.’
He revealed that with the introduction of Free SHS, which has seen the SHS population jump from 800,000 in the 2016/17 academic year to 1.2 million in the 2019/20 academic year, it became important to innovate in order for every child to gain access to SHS education.
Stressing on the government’s desire that no child should be left behind, he asked rhetorically, “whose child should stay at home?”
The two-day event, which will end tomorrow, further includes the plenary and panel discussions on progress and challenges in the specified reform areas and identify the next steps, with recommendations on the way forward.
According to the Deputy Public Relations Officer of the Ministry, Kwasi Obeng Fosu, with COVID-19 and school closures affecting the majority of children in the world, there is currently a huge amount of thinking, collaboration, innovation, experimentation and research occurring in Ghana and across all countries to enable education, teaching and learning to still happen in the context of COVID-19.
This combined presents a critical opportunity to have new conversations about education reform and delivery, assessing progress so far, and what needs to be changed in order to plan for the future, and that is the opportunity that the National Education Week offers stakeholders.