The Executive Director of the Africa Education Watch, Kofi Asare, has attributed dropout at the Junior High School (JHS) level to the distance between where the pupils live and the schools, especially in rural areas.
He indicated that some of the students have to walk for kilometers in order to reach their schools. “This is a disincentive for them to continue,” he said.
Furthermore, he said, the lack of junior high schools in most rural areas is a factor causing the dropout.
Speaking at a national dialogue session organized by Media General and STAR-Ghana on Thursday, April 4, he said “Distance, lack of junior high schools are factors for the dip from P6 and JHS 1.”
He said that about 4000 primary schools don’t have corresponding JHSs.
The third factor he identified is the disparity in teacher deployment. He noted that the unavailability of teachers in rural areas is causing the dropout.
Also speaking at the same forum, the Public Relations Officer of the Ministry of Education touted the achievement of the free Senior High School (SHS) programme.
He says the results of the West Africa Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) have seen significant and consistent improvement under the free SHS policy.
He added that although the quality of education is not where it is expected to be, the fact remains that the quality is not bad presently.
“When access increases, the general template is that quality decreases, but even though we are not where we have to be, we are not doing badly,” he said during the national dialogue session organized by Media General and STAR-Ghana on Thursday, April 4.
He added, “Data from WASSCE clearly show that there has been consistency and significant improvement.”
Kwasi Kwarteng also mentioned the ‘One Student One Laptop’ initiative as one of the interventions to improve on quality education.
“We have the ‘One Student One laptop’, we have done quite a significant work,” he said.