(Forum on SHS duration helped to tackle problems)

Page 14, June 13, 2009
Story: Emmanuel Adu-Gyamerah
THE Chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on Education, Mr Mathias Puozaa, has stated that the recent forum organised to deliberate on the duration of the senior high school (SHS) system offered the country another chance to take a look at problems confronting the system.
He said it was, however, unfortunate that people took entrenched positions before, during and after the forum.
Mr Puozaa, who is an educationist and the Member of Parliament (MP) for Nadowli East, told the Daily Graphic that when the New Patriotic Party (NPP) took office in 2001, it behaved as if its predecessor had left nothing good in the education sector for the country.
He cited for instance that the then government changed school uniforms for basic schools while the word “secondary” was dropped and substituted with “high” to change the name of the second cycle education.
Mr Puozaa stated that the NPP administration appointed the Anamoa-Mensah Committee to review the educational system that had been in place since 1987.
He said that committee did its work diligently and came up with recommendations which included integrating pre-school into the regular system.
Mr Puozaa stated that the new reforms had increased the number of years in the basic education system by two years unless one would want to argue that those two years would not be spent for teaching and learning.
He added that the Anamoa-Mensah Committee also saw nothing wrong with the three-year duration of the SHS system provided there would be improvement in the provision of teachers to enhance the teaching and learning process.
Mr Puozaa said he was of the opinion that the Anamao-Mensah Committee would not have recommended the three-year duration if it had not found it feasible.
He recalled that all the participants at the recent forum agreed that given the necessary facilities and supervision, there would not be the need for an additional year at the SHS level.
Mr Puozaa said that position was informed by the statistics presented by experts who were the resource persons of the forum.
He said the fact that people agreed that even five years of SHS would not yield the required results if the authorities failed to improve standards at the basic level was a clear indication that the three-year duration was all right.
“I believe we will be doing ourselves good if we try to identify why our students are not performing and solve those problems in order to go forward in the right direction”, he said.
Mr Puozaa added that all participating countries of the WASSCE did three years of SHS education and questioned why Ghana wanted to extend the period students spent to write the same examination.