The flagbearer of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), John Mahama, has explained that the next NDC government under his leadership will make private schools part of the Free SHS policy.
According to him, private schools are willing to be part of the policy and take the same fees that the government spends on students in public SHS. He added that the bringing on board of private SHSs would help introduce more schools, infrastructure, and human resources in such schools, which will go a long way to help start dealing with the overcrowding in public SHSs that has resulted from the double-track system, among other things.
He explained this during his town hall meeting with the clergy in Kumasi over the weekend. According to him, the neglect of private SHS in the implementation of the Free SHS has negatively affected such schools. He furthered that a situation in Nzema where all students in a private SHS were re-enrolled in a free public SHS led to the destruction of the private SHS since the school no longer had students. Mahama added that this created overcrowding in the public SHS and unused capacity in the private school.
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The next NDC government plans to include private schools in its efforts to redistribute learners from public SHSs to private schools and other public schools with greater capacity. Under the Free SHS policy, students enrolled in private SHS will still have free access to secondary education.
John Mahama, the flagbearer of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), affirmed his commitment to include private schools in the Free SHS policy. According to him, this will lessen the burden of such neglected schools and make more facilities available for the Free SHS.
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Ghanaians go to the polls on December 7th, and the Free SHS policy is one key campaign message being used to win voters by both the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the largest opposition party in Ghana, the National Democratic Congress (NDC).