The Broken Covenant: Student Indiscipline in Ghana's SHS and the Widening Gulf Between Teachers and Pupils

The video was difficult to watch. A teacher at Nyinahin Catholic Senior High School in the Ashanti Region caught on camera repeatedly striking an 18-year-old female student before lifting her off the ground and throwing her down, as onlookers pleaded with him to stop. Preliminary police investigations revealed that teacher Eric Buernortey Apaflo, 39, had confronted the student Patience Chibu, along with some male students, over alleged misconduct at the school hostel a confrontation that escalated into what police describe as an assault. (Pulse Ghana) Reports indicate the immediate trigger was the non-payment of hostel fees, with students heard in the footage saying the teacher had been "fighting us every day over money."

Both the teacher and the student were arrested. The Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT) in the Ashanti Region subsequently threatened to boycott the English Language WASSCE examination and embark on protests if their colleague was not released. The Ghana Education Service confirmed investigations were underway. And Ghana, once again, found itself watching a viral video as a proxy for a much deeper crisis not merely of one teacher losing his composure, but of an entire educational ecosystem under severe strain.

A System at Breaking Point
The Nyinahin incident is not an outlier. It is a data point in what Ghana's teacher unions have rightly described as an emergency. In February 2026, GNAT and the National Association of Graduate Teachers (NAGRAT) jointly called on the Ghana Education Service to convene an emergency meeting to develop and enforce a comprehensive student code of conduct, following violent clashes involving students of Obrachire Senior High Technical School and Swedru School of Business in the Central Region.

In another incident, students of Aggrey Memorial Senior High School were arrested after allegedly ambushing and brutally assaulting a final-year student of Adisadel College at Pedu Junction in Cape Coast following an inter-colleges sports festival an attack that left the victim with a fractured eye socket. In a separate case at Akro SHS, a student allegedly assaulted a teacher and stabbed a security guard with a broken bottle.

Earlier, five students at Kade Senior High Technical School were remanded by the Kade District Court in the Eastern Region for allegedly assaulting their teacher Michael Quayson over examination invigilation practices. The Ghana Education Service declared zero tolerance. Police made arrests. Prosecutors filed charges. And still the incidents continued.

The Ministry of Education was compelled in February 2026 to issue a formal warning that assaults on teachers would attract severe consequences under Ghanaian law testament to how little traction earlier pronouncements had achieved. As far back as April 2025, Education Minister Haruna Iddrisu had publicly instructed the GES to take immediate steps to restore discipline in senior high schools, an acknowledgment at the highest policy level that the problem had grown beyond the capacity of individual schools to manage.

The Root Cause No One Wants to Name
The structural driver of this crisis is not invisible. The introduction of the Free Senior High School policy in 2017 produced a 72 percent surge in SHS enrolment in a single academic year. The system was simply not designed to absorb that scale of expansion. Larger student populations, overstretched teachers, inadequate counseling infrastructure, and the abolition of meaningful gatekeeping in school admission collectively created conditions in which discipline eroded.

Today, classrooms in many SHS facilities hold 60 to 80 students at a time. Educators have identified behavioral shifts among students, with significant numbers reportedly spending excessive time on social media platforms like TikTok. The teacher-student relationship, once anchored in proximity, mentorship, and sustained personal interaction, has been diluted to the point of anonymity in many schools. A teacher managing 70 students per class across multiple streams cannot know those students as individuals. And students who are not known as individuals are less likely to internalize the moral authority of their teachers.

Academic research has confirmed that high enrolment rates under the Free SHS policy culminated in teacher shortages, increased workload for existing teachers, classroom deficits, overcrowding, a high rate of indiscipline, and inadequate teaching and learning materials. These are not anecdotal observations. They are documented, structural outcomes of a policy whose access ambitions outpaced its investment in the conditions that make access meaningful.

The Gap Between Teachers and Students
At the heart of the discipline crisis is a widening relational gap between teachers and students and it runs in both directions. Teachers who feel unsupported, disrespected, and institutionally abandoned by an overwhelmed system are more likely to respond to provocation with the kind of disproportionate force seen at Nyinahin. Students who have grown up watching authority figures evade accountability, who are shaped by social media cultures that celebrate defiance, and who navigate schools where no adult has the time or capacity to genuinely know them, are more likely to act out.

This is the tragedy of a covenant broken by neglect before either party could honor it. The relationship between teacher and student is foundational to everything education is supposed to accomplish not merely the transmission of content, but the formation of character, the modeling of ethical behavior, the construction of a young person's sense of their own dignity and responsibility. When that relationship is reduced to hostility, or erased by classroom numbers, or corroded by mutual suspicion, the consequences radiate far beyond the school gate.

Many voices have called for stronger guidance and counseling programmes, as well as improved communication between staff and students on disciplinary expectations. (YEN News) These are important but insufficient. Counseling infrastructure in Ghanaian SHSs remains woefully thin. A single guidance counselor serving hundreds or thousands of students cannot provide the individualized attention that adolescent development requires.

What the GES and Government Must Do
Education Minister Haruna Iddrisu has announced a national forum scheduled for July 2026 to address the growing problem of student misconduct, describing it as a threat to schools that are supposed to shape future leaders. "Parenting is a shared responsibility," he said. "Teachers and parents must work together if we want the best out of these children." That acknowledgement is welcome, but forums that do not produce binding commitments and funded implementation plans will add nothing to the pile of statements already on record.

The GES must finalize and enforce a comprehensive national student code of conduct with real consequences including suspension and dismissal for students who physically assault teachers or staff. Equally, teachers must be held to binding standards of professional conduct that make physical aggression against students grounds for immediate dismissal, not just arrest and investigation.

Beyond enforcement, the government must address the structural drivers. Class sizes must be brought down to manageable levels through the accelerated completion of the E-Block schools and expansion of teacher recruitment. The student-to-counselor ratio must be made a national standard, not an aspiration. Parent-Teacher Associations, recently reactivated nationwide, must be given genuine roles in school governance and discipline not as rubber stamps for administrative decisions, but as active partners in the formation of school culture.

The teenagers in Ghana's SHSs are not a generation of incorrigibles. They are young people navigating an accelerated and often disorienting world one shaped by economic pressure, social media, urban migration, and the complex legacies of communities in transition in schools that were not built to hold them in the numbers they now arrive, and were not staffed for the complexity they now carry. The growing indiscipline is a symptom. The disease is institutional neglect dressed up as progressive policy.

Ghana's SHS classrooms will not be safe and productive learning spaces until the covenant between teacher and student is rebuilt not through threats and arrests, but through investment, respect, and the restoration of the conditions in which genuine education can take place.

Mustapha Bature Sallama.
Medical/ Science Communicator,
Private Investigator, Criminal investigation and Intelligence Analysis.

International Conflict Management and Peace Building.USIP

mustysallama@gmail.com
+233-555-275-880

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