Former spokesperson for the Ministry of Education, Yaw Opoku Mensah, has pushed back against claims by Education Minister Haruna Iddrisu that the Free Senior High School (Free SHS) policy was rolled out without adequate infrastructure to support the surge in enrolment.
In a detailed rebuttal, Mr Opoku Mensah argued that the Akufo-Addo administration invested heavily in classroom infrastructure to support the flagship education programme, insisting that the record contradicts suggestions that the policy lacked the physical capacity to accommodate students.
According to him, the implementation of Free SHS was accompanied by deliberate investments in school infrastructure aimed at expanding access to secondary education across the country.
He praised former President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, together with former Education Ministers Dr Matthew Opoku Prempeh and Dr Yaw Osei Adutwum, for what he described as a strategic effort to combine policy reform with infrastructure development.
“National self-respect requires respectable leadership, national pride demands leaders of integrity, and national redemption depends on dedicated leadership,” he said, adding that those values were reflected in the leadership that implemented the programme.
Mr Opoku Mensah presented figures he said demonstrate the scale of classroom expansion during the eight years of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) administration.
According to him, a total of 4,699 classrooms were constructed across the country through a combination of three-unit, six-unit, twelve-unit, eighteen-unit and twenty-four-unit classroom blocks at various senior high schools.
He contrasted this with the period under former Presidents John Evans Atta Mills and John Dramani Mahama, during which 29 Community Day Senior High Schools were built, producing 696 classrooms in total.
Using an estimated class size of 40 students, Mr Opoku Mensah argued that the classrooms constructed under the Akufo-Addo government alone created space for approximately 187,960 additional students, compared with about 27,840 students who could be accommodated in the classrooms built during the Mills–Mahama era.
He also noted that the figures cited relate strictly to classroom blocks and do not include other infrastructure investments such as dormitories, newly established schools, STEM institutions, and Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) facilities undertaken during the period.
Mr Opoku Mensah maintained that when the full scope of education investments is considered, the claim that Free SHS was implemented without expanding infrastructure does not accurately reflect the scale of projects undertaken.
His comments follow remarks by Haruna Iddrisu, who recently suggested that although Free SHS significantly expanded access to secondary education, the previous government did not sufficiently increase infrastructure to match the growing number of students entering the system.
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Source: www.myjoyonline.com