The Free Senior High School Programme And The Double Track System: My Take!

Introduction
According to the United Nations, education is not just necessary for human wellbeing because it is critical to human resource development but because it is a human right and a key to achieving other human rights. For instance, education provides the individual skills to earn a living, acquire property and to protect their civil and political rights.

It is for these reasons that governments all over the world provide education for their citizens. It is also for the same reason that the world made the provision of education a human right issue and part of the MDGs and the SDGs. It is against the same backdrop that various governments in Ghana since independence have prioritized the provision of education among other development agenda, making it a constitutional issue as the Fourth Republican Constitutions of 1992 provides for free, compulsory basic education and a progressively free secondary, tertiary and lifelong education for all Ghanaians.

In order to practicalise this constitutional provision, the Capitation Grant was introduced in 2004 under the government of President John Agyekum Kufuor to make the provision of education free for all Ghanaian children of school going age at the basic school level. It is for the same reason that the current government under Nana Addo Dankwah Akuffo-Addo took a bold decision to implement the Free Senior High School programme. The programme has since created opportunity for many Ghanaian children to enter Senior High School, something that had eluded many children of Senior High School age before the introduction of the programme as they could not bear the cost of Senior High School.

However, the increase in students’ numbers in Senior High Schools as a result of the introduction of the Free Senior High School programme has put undue pressure on school infrastructure, such as classrooms, dormitories, dining halls, assembly halls, student-teacher ratio and what have you. It is due to the need to address these challenges that the Double-Track System has been introduced.

The Double Track Senior High School System

The Double Track Senior High School system relates to a situation where the school or academic year is divided into two instead of three or a semester instead of a trimester as it used to be in Ghanaian Second Cycle Schools. Similarly, Senior High School students and staff are divided into two groups or cohorts so that, while one group is in school for a period, the other group stays at home for the same period and when those in school vacate, those at home will take over and vice versa. Of course, it is not all Senior High Schools in the country that are to run the system. Thus, Senior High Schools with adequate infrastructure do not run the system.

Debate on the Double Track System
The introduction of the Double Track Senior High School system has generated debate among the general public. On one hand, some have commended the government for using the system as a strategy for addressing the challenges created by the Free Senior High School programme. On the other hand, others have questioned the readiness of the government to introduce the Free Senior High School programme since these challenges could have been anticipated given that infrastructure in Senior High Schools were already over stretched before the introduction of the programme. In other words, the government should have expanded infrastructure in Senior High Schools before introducing the programme. However, a question arises as to when this would have happened given how long the problem has been with us.

Whether the government should have provided the requisite infrastructure before introducing the Free Senior High School programme or introduce the programme before addressing the infrastructural challenges, what was obvious was that there were fundamental issues that needed to be addressed. In the first place, the inability of some BECE graduates to access Senior School education due to cost constraints created a situation where those affected were becoming a nuisance to society because they did not have the requisite skills to earn a living. Besides, the situation was denying the nation of critical human resource since a chunk of the nation’s human resource was not well developed to contribute to national development. Therefore, there was the need to address the problem.

It is for this reason that I think the government deserves commendation for taking a bold decision to introduce the Free Senior High School programme and the Double Track system to contain the challenges emanating from the Free Senior High School programme. I support such bold decisions because they create opportunity for generating innovative ideas that can stimulate and speed up our development.

It is worth noting that most of the development projects and programmes that we take pride in as a nation were initiated amidst strong opposition and criticisms. These include projects such as the Akosombo Hydro Dam, the Tema Motorway, the ‘Job 600’, the Operation Feed Yourself and Feed Your Industry programme, the extension of electricity to Northern Ghana, the establishment of the University for Development Studies, the introduction of the Value Added Tax, the National Health Insurance Scheme and many others. Therefore, the current debate on the Double Track Senior High School system should not surprise anybody who knows the political economy history of Ghana.

What matters in my opinion, therefore, is that the challenges of the free Senior High School programme offer us an opportunity to find innovative ways of addressing them. So let us allow the debates to flourish since that can generate innovative ideas as to how the challenges can be addressed. As part of the debate, some have suggested that the government should use pre-fabricated materials to construct the requisite infrastructure to contain the infrastructural challenge. Others have suggested that the government should construct pavilions instead of complete buildings for the same purpose since the former is comparatively less costly. These are but a few suggestions that are being made as a way ford to tackling the infrastructural challenge in the long run.

Conclusion
As long term strategies towards addressing the challenges of the Senior High School system, the government needs to consider these suggestions. It is also important that we the citizens exercise restraint in order to ensure that the programme is well implemented so that we can derive its full benefits.

Dr. Sulemana Adams Achanso
Socio-Political Analyst
Dean, Faculty of Education
University for Development Studies
Tamale, Ghana.