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A careful analysis of the tables attached to the 2018 budget statement which sets out details of government expenditure for the 2018 fiscal year, reveals that no specific provision has been made to provide urgent solutions to the unacceptable conditions prevailing in schools across the country. The tables show that an amount of GHS 1,137,861,816 has been allocated to the over 600 Senior High Schools in Ghana to cater for the absorbed fees.
This amount works out GHS 284,465,454 per term for four terms, three terms in 2018 for the first year students admitted in September this year and the first term starting in September for those to be admitted next academic year. The amount is woefully inadequate and falls far short of the GHS 480 million estimated to be the cost of the programme per term. Government allocated that amount for the payment of fees for the current school term but only a paltry 20% has so far been released.
A promised second 20% tranche scheduled to have been released about a month ago is still outstanding. This coupled with routinely-long delays in the release of government funds to schools is set to leave the country’s Senior High Schools extremely distressed.
The massive shortfall in funding leaves very little room for investment in badly-needed infrastructure whose absence has led to severe congestion condemning students to live and study under appalling and insanitary conditions. Further analysis of the budget tables show that only GHS 260,838,709 has been allocated to the Ministry of Education for capital expenditure.This amount is also inadequate to meet the infrastructure needs of all the levels of education from basic through secondary to tertiary. In addition to the uncertainty about funding, hundreds of Senior High Schools including supposed ‘Class A’ schools are grappling with acute congestion.
NPP stalwart Dr Kwame Amoako Tuffuor has publicly admitted to weeping over the horrible conditions that he saw students live in during an inspection tour he undertook in some schools. The situation has been so dire, that an overwhelmed Ghana Education Service Director-General, Kwesi Opoku Amankwaa has publicly admitted that he has seen dormitories in secondary schools that pass for “death traps”.
This week a Nungua Magistrate Court ordered the closure of the Nungua Senior High school until the unacceptable conditions at the school toilet are addressed The Ghana Palaver has obtained disturbing pictures, which we have published in our middle middle spread, of students of some schools sleeping on corridors of classrooms and dormitories due to lack of space.
In other schools where dormitories could be found, students were compelled due to a lack of beds to sleep on the bare floors or in some instances, sleep on tiny mattresses on the floor.
In other cases, the trunks and “chop boxes” of students had to be kept on corridors due to lack of space to store them. A most worrying situation has also emerged where teenagers between the ages of 14 and 16, have been compelled to pay exhorbitant fees to stay in hostels and compound houses with little or no supervision.
Some of the hostels are in deplorable condition endangering the health and safety of these children. In some Regions, female students have had to take up jobs as domestic helps in the bungalows and homes of some teachers in order to be accommodated there. This leaves them vulnerable to sexual exploitation by predatory teachers.
The situation is not a rural phenomenon. In urban areas including Accra, visits to some schools show an acute shortage of classrooms and critical teaching materials. At the La Presby School here in Accra, pictures have emerged of students receiving instruction in uncompleted buildings serving as makeshift classrooms.
In about nine such classrooms, there were no teaching boards forcing teachers to resort to verbal instruction. Additionally, there were no desks, a situation that compelled students to use cement blocks as chairs. At the St Thomas Aquinas School in the affluent Cantonments area, the Science Laboratory has had to be converted into an impromptu classroom in order to deal with severe congestion. Instead of 540 students the school can cope with, 819 students were placed. This has resulted in the packing of 80 students into classrooms that should take 40 for effective teaching and learning.
At the Adonten Senior High School at Aburi in the Eastern
Region, an uncompleted Assembly Hall has been converted into a classroom to accommodate more students due to the non-availability of adequate classrooms. The situation is more horrific at the Klo-Agogo Senior High School in the Yilo Krobo Municipality where 660 students sleep in turns in classrooms converted for the purpose. Uncompleted buildings and an Assembly Hall in the school are also used as dormitories. Four students also share a desk for teaching and learning purposes.
Earlier this months,25 students of the school contracted pneumonia and malaria as a result of the insanitary conditions prevailing in the school. Elsewhere, inadequate funding has made it impossible for school authorities to deliver meaningfully, on the President’s promise to provide one hot meal a day for every SHS student.
In instances where some food is provided, it is substandard and lacking in nutritional value. At the Kwabenya Community SHS in Accra, it emerged last week that students were fed ‘waakye’- a local delicacy, without any fish or meat. The problem of poor quality food is widespread. Checks at the Mamfi Methodist Girls Senior High School, also in the Eastern Region, show that very small quantities of food are served the students. The quality of the food was also found to be low.
In some schools students have to eat under trees as there are no purpose-built dining halls. Even as hundreds of schools with hundreds of thousands of students grapple with this horrendous situation, several
Private Senior High Schools which in the past complemented the efforts of public schools to address the problem of congestion are empty with many facing bankruptcy. President Akufo Addo and his government’s response to this calamity befalling education has been vanity and loud proclamations of vindication over his ability to fulfil a transformational promise. Instead of outlining clear measures to ease the disaster unfolding at the SHS level, Ghanaians have been served vague promises of addressing the challenges.
In the past, the mantle fell of District Assemblies and GETFund to offer infrastructure interventions to alleviate the problem. Their ability to do so now is severely constrained as those funds themselves have been capped in order to raise money to finance the payment of fees for the first year students under the Free SHS programme. The tables in the budget show that even the earmarked funds have been raided by government to finance a number of extravagant campaign promises.
Given that this is the situation when only first year students are supposed to be benefiting from the programme, there are no prizes for guessing what the situation will be when Akufo Addo and his government have to fend for all three cohorts who would number about 1.2 million students in 2019. Precipitous declines in quality and standards appear to be inevitable under the circumstance
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