<<Print>>National Democratic Congress [NDC] Member of Parliament for Ningo Prampram, Sam George, has said the NPP government is now paying dearly for playing politics with former President Mahama’s community day SHS project which he claims has been abandoned.
Speaking on Citi TV’s Breakfast Daily show on infrastructure challenges hampering the intake of more students under the government’s Free Senior High School programme, the MP said “…the turnaround time for the construction of those buildings was 18 months. It means that 123 senior high schools would have been completed by this academic year if we weren’t playing politics. Those projects have been left to rot, in whatever state they were in. This is not just in the education sector, it’s happening across the board. We now have a problem where we’ve finished the first stream, and the second stream is coming in. Where are we going to put them? The issue of access has come back to bite us.”
“If we were a country that thinks, and not just talk, as one president starts an infrastructural drive and another comes in with his own vision, he won’t abrogate the other’s vision, especially when the former president’s dream ties in with the achievement of the current president.”His statement comes after the President Nana Akufo-Addo, announced that the dual intake system for new entrants into the country’s senior high schools will start from September 2018.
“Yes, Nana Addo wants to see as many Ghanaian children as possible going to the Senior High school, fantastic, but where are you going to put those children? John Mahama started building the classrooms for them, but because they will be called ‘Mahama schools’ and partisanship, we will not finish them.”
Speaking on the new system, Nana Akufo-Addo said “Unfortunately, we have not been able to increase the infrastructure as rapidly as the number of entrants. But if you are prepared to find a way, you will find that way, and we have found a way to be able to absorb this intake. We call it the dual intake system that is going to allow us on a semester basis, to address the challenge of this new population,” the president said.
He added that the new system will be accompanied by an increase in the number of teachers.
“We are doing it by first of all expanding the number of teachers. We are recruiting over 8,000 more teachers for the secondary schools this year than we had last year, and then we are going to employ a double track school calendar system.”
Meanwhile, the National Association of Graduate Teachers (NAGRAT) has cautioned the government against implementing the multi-track system in SHS without consulting stakeholders in education.
“I would suggest that Prof. Anamuah and his team should start a stakeholder discussion on this issue. Let us not rush into something like that. In the document that I saw, this policy is supposed to last for only five years because within the next five years, what we are hearing from the corridors of power is that government would have then built infrastructure to accommodate all the two streams. When that happens, what would you do with those teachers? We need to sit down and discuss this situation thoroughly as a nation. Let us not rush into something that will spite our faces over time,” the president of the association, Angel Carbonu has said.
How will the Dual Intake system work?
The dual intake system will run in all the categories of A and B senior high schools in the country.
The new programme creates a calendar of two semesters in a year for the SHS 1 class, containing 81 days per semester and 41 days of vacation for a sandwich class.
Under this new system, teaching hours will be increased from six hours a day to eight hours, which means that in a year, the teaching hours will be expected to increase from 1,080 hours in the current single-track system to 1,134 hours.