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President Mahama in his determination to improve quality of education in Ghana has announced in the state of the nation address that 123 Community Based Schools are currently being implemented and are at different stages of construction.

According to him, taking into account the first secondary school which was established in Ghana 140 years ago in 1876, the number of public secondary schools established between that date and 2012 was 526 but the 123 schools that are being implemented right now will create almost 200,000 new places in the system.

“…thereby making the Community Based School intervention the biggest ever expansion program in the entire history of secondary education in Ghana. Secondary education was placed with a number of challenges, notably lack of access leading to poor transition rate from JHS to SHS. We are vigorously confronting these challenges under our program to establish 200 SHS.”

He added that under the secondary education improvement program, about 10,400 students have benefited from scholarships with 60 percent of the beneficiaries being young women.

Touching on the tertiary enrolment, President John Mahama before the Members of Parliament and other dignitaries disclosed that the number has increased by 6.3% for Universities and 8.9% for Polytechnics.

He emphatically stated that since the inauguration of the main campus of the University of Health and Allied Sciences last year at Ho it has achieved many remarkable stories as more than 2,300 students have been enrolled into this institution.

President Mahama however indicated that the establishment of the University for Health and Allied Sciences at Ho has created 816 direct jobs for teaching and non-teaching staff.

With the basic school improvement, President Mahama said his government has introduced two new programs namely, the teacher professional development and the provision of teaching and learning materials program.

“The teacher professional development initiative aims to attain a target of 95% trained teachers at the basic level by 2020 as set out in the education strategic plan. The provision of teaching and learning materials program has also seen the distribution of teaching and learning materials to 10,924 basic schools in addition, 30,000 trained teachers in ICT under the basic school computerization program bringing the total number of trained teacher under the program to 50,000,” he said.