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Deputy Minister for Education in charge of General Education, Dr. Yaw Osei Adutwum has said private schools in the country are not benefiting from the free Senior High School programme because their tutors do not qualify to teach in public schools.

According to him, facilities in such schools do not also meet standards set by the Ghana Education Service.

“…the teachers we have at the private schools do not have the qualification to teach at the public senior high schools and once you are using public money, everything you are doing there should be at the public level,” he said on the Citi Breakfast Show on Tuesday.

The Akufo-Addo government started the implementation of the free SHS programme in 2017 offering students the secondary level an opportunity to attend school without paying anything.

Some of the private schools, however, appealed to the government to cover include them on the programme but their pleas were ignored.

Dr. Adutwum on the Citi Breakfast Show said one of the reasons why such schools were not included was because the private secondary schools would be asked to hire new teachers and upgrade their facilities.

He added that such directive would, however, bring too much burden on most of the private schools hence the decision not to include them.

“They are going to be told that all the teachers they have do not qualify to teach here and therefore they should hire a whole new set of teachers. And by the way, the national inspectorate board would have to come to the private schools, look at their buildings and raise issues with their buildings.”

“They [national inspectorate board] may also say the private schools do not have science labs that meet the specification of the Ghana Education Service in terms of lab requirements. They may also request for computer labs. So it sounds so simple and easy for someone to say they have space, space does not educate the children.  You must have a system in place which takes a long time to build,” the Deputy Education Minister explained.

Following calls for the scrapping of boarding from the free SHS programme to ensure its sustenance, Dr. Adutwum said the government is not considering such a move.

“We felt that the boarding system is a fabric of our education so we did not consider changing it…and not all communities have day schools.”

He argued that a number of deprived students would suffer if such a move is adopted.

“All communities don’t have day schools. It’s not that simple. When you do that you are going to disadvantage those who cannot afford. If you look at Accra, the vast majority of students are in day schools. 76 percent of students in Accra are day students. And Accra schools do very well. The same thing cannot be said in other regions where the location or where the population is distributed does not lend itself to the implementation of a very strong day programme,” he stated.