The Chairman of the Ghana Education Service (GES) Board, Michael Nsowah, says the skills students acquire from the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) does not support the modern development agenda of this country and due to this, plans are ongoing to make secondary school compulsory for everyone.
He mentioned that infrastructure for the double intake system has not been completed since education is competing for a part of the country’s budget with all the other sectors.
“The road map for the free compulsory secondary education is removing cost barriers that prevent people from accepting secondary school education.”
He was speaking on 3FM’s Sunrise on Wednesday.
He stated that the government has made sure that all the congestion in schools has been solved with the intervention of double intake.
“It is not about the number of classroom blocks but how to organize the system and that is what we are doing now,” he said.
“For instance, we are taking into consideration the congestion caused by the Free SHS and now we are introducing the double track system.
According to the former Director General of GES, even though Ghana cannot achieve 100 per cent universal basic education, it has gone far by being amongst the top countries with gross enrolment of 86 per cent.
He further said that Ghana’s dropout rate has reduced considerably due to the interventions put in place and hence the compulsory universal secondary education is targeting children in rural communities who do not go to school even though the conditions have been put in place.
He, however, expressed disappointment in the 2018 WASSCE results and assured Ghanaians that procedures are being introduced to solve the issue of the poor performance of students in their secondary school examinations.
By Portia Gafah|3news.com|Ghana