ASEPA accuse headmasters of selling free SHS slots to street boys
The Executive Director for the Alliance for Social Equity and Public Accountability (ASEPA), Mensah Thompson has said the activities of some heads of Senior High Schools (SHSs) may collapse the free SHS policy.
He noted that some unscrupulous heads of institutions take money from parents to admit their wards into their second cycle institutions only for government to pay.
Mr. Thompson added that government allocates the exact funds to cover the number of students posted to the various schools.
According to him, some heads of institutions in the Greater Accra Region, Oti Region and Western Region are filling up slots left by students who did not report to the school or may have left the school.
Addressing the media in Accra, he stated, “Every year, government send a certain number of students to secondary schools. Now when government sends a certain number of students to a school, it registers say school ‘A’. government sends 500 students to the school, the system automatically registers these persons that school ‘A’ has registered this number of students under the free SHS policy which government is spending money on.
“Now when these students move from form one, by the time they get to form three some of the students just drop out of school and others do not even go to the school at all and opt for other forms of education and so by the time they get the final year, the number of students government sent to the school would have declined leading to gaps.
“What is happening is that these gaps created by these incidents are being filled during the registration of students by some unscrupulous headmasters. They get people from the streets, take money from them and then put their name in the system and government pays for it and this is something we have identified,” he told the press.
Mr. Thompson stated that his outfit had shared its findings of the schools involved to some government agencies for action to be taken.
He stressed that government has agreed to introduce some form of biometric verification in the disbursement of funds per the number of students posted to the schools.
However, he indicated that the process has delayed creating room for the headmaster to continue their nefarious activities.
Mr Thompson urged government to speed up “immediate steps to fix the loopholes in the sector. If it’s planning to introduce biometric reforms in the sector they must do it immediately so that we know that we are actually paying for the right people and nobody is paying for ghost students.”
Source: Modernghana
