Executive Director of Institute for Education Studies (IFEST), Dr Peter Anti, has called on the Ghana Education Service (GES) to audit the enrolment numbers of students submitted by senior high school authorities.

According to him, the move will ensure that ample accommodation will be given the students especially following the incident which occurred at the Ghana Senior High School, in Tamale where a washroom was turned into an accommodation facility for students. He revealed that the GES should equally get people to verify the information submitted by senior high schools to ensure students are given the needed accommodation.

“GES should not sit back and wait for some of these things to come up before they issue these directives and other things because they know that schools are going through this challenge. What I think they should do is an immediate audit of the data that is sent to them by the various school authorities.
“My interaction with some of the schools indicate that sometimes, because the student numbers might be less some teachers might end up not having the requisite load that they need to get and some of the school authorities are embarking on some of these additional enrolments to ensure that teachers get the total workload to do.”
Dr Peter Anti

Dr Anti indicated that the development at GHANASCO is something which is not new to IFEST because every now and then, it receives information about inadequate infrastructure in secondary schools. He explained that this is the challenge the increase in enrolments, which is a good thing, has brought to the secondary education sector.

Nonetheless, he stated that what he finds a bit surprising is the way that the issue is being handled – emphasizing that this is a small part of a bigger problem that is facing secondary education.

“… We were thinking that although it’s good that the needed measures need to be taken, in terms of the approach that might have been adopted by the school authorities, we think that the GES should use the same energy to address the teething challenges that is facing the various secondary schools in the country.”
Dr Peter Anti

IFEST laments challenges in the education sector

The executive director of IFEST reckoned that the GHANASCO incident is not an isolated case and that it is part of a bigger problem that stakeholders have been talking about for a long period now. He elaborated that the GES should understand that the problem is not a GHANASCO problem but cuts across most of the country’s secondary schools and requisite action needs to be taken as early as possible.

“So, for the GES to react and ask the headmaster and the other authorities to step aside for investigations to take place seems to suggest that they are not aware of the accommodation challenges that students are facing, and that for me is surprising because this is not anything new. Maybe what is intriguing is the fact that the figures given by the school authorities seems not to add up to the information that GES is having.”
Dr Peter Anti

Commenting on whether GES should be blamed for what happened in GHANASCO, especially considering records available to GES which indicate that, out of the 1790 vacancies declared by the school, only 1467 students have enrolled, Dr Anti stated that if the record is anything to go by, the schools shouldn’t have students struggling for accommodation. However, he questioned whether students in the school are all having access to beds.

To this end, Dr Anti entreated GES to further check the enrolment history of that particular school.

‘I’m suggesting that the GES should be aware that most of our schools in the country are facing infrastructure challenges. I’m saying that if a figure is given to the Ghana Education Service, it is duty bound on them to verify to ensure that the students that are being sent to those schools are truly going to have the needed kind of accommodation that they deserve. This they can do by just crosschecking the data that they collect every year.”
Dr Peter Anti

Dr Anti revealed that due to the information provided by GES, the public need to be patient and wait for the investigation into the matter to be concluded and the report shared.