President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has stated that the introduction and implementation of the Free Senior High School (SHS) policy has ensured that hundreds of thousands of young Ghanaian men and women now have access to quality education.
These young Ghanaians, he reiterated, who, previously, would have had their education truncated at Junior High School level, now have the opportunity to further their education.
“The policy has reversed decades of exclusion, which denied, on the average, one hundred thousand young men and women, annually, entry to senior high school education because of the poverty of their parents,” the President pointed out.
President Akufo-Addo made the observations on Saturday, when the University of Cape Coast conferred an Honorary Doctor of Philosophy in Educational Leadership degree on him, at a ceremony at the campus of the University.
The free SHS policy was introduced by the Akufo-Addo administration in 2017 and it dramatically expanded access to education, enabling hundreds of thousands of Ghanaian children from all corners of our country, to go to senior high school.
It ensured over 1.3 million young children had access to education without their parents coughing up school fees.
Speaking after the honour done him, President Akufo-Addo added that the Free SHS policy has meant that Ghana can now begin to reap the fruits of the talents of all its young people, as has been spectacularly demonstrated by the outstanding results of the first graduands of the policy in the most recent West African Secondary School Certificate Examination (WASSCE).
“Of the four hundred and sixty-five (465) who obtained 8As in the exams, the ‘Akufo-Addo graduates’ from Ghana, as they have become known, were responsible for four hundred and eleven (411) of them.
“Not only has access been widened, but quality has also been maintained, indeed, enhanced. Government is also ensuring that access to tertiary education is expanded, through the removal of the guarantor requirement that makes it difficult for some students to apply for loans through the Student Loan Trust Fund programme,” President Akufo-Addo added.
This process of expansion of educational opportunities, he stressed, “has to be the bedrock of educational policy in the 21st century for our nation, if we are to make the rapid transformation of our social and economic lives we all seek.”
