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The Government of Ghana through the Ministry of Education (MoE) and the Ghana Education Service (GES) sought to increase access to secondary school education by expanding facilities, withemphasis on Day schools as opposed to the more traditional boarding schools. To this end, the state committed to building 200 new Community Day Senior High Schools (SHS), especially in deprived areas. Funding, however, was a challenge.

The SEIP

The Secondary Education Improvement Project is an intervention by Government of Ghana to solve some of the challenges faced by some senior secondary schools in the country. With a funding of $156 million from the World Bank in 2014, and an additional financing of $40 million in 2019, the SEIP built 23 of the 200 new Community Day Senior High Schools the Government had committed to build, and also addressed some challenges in the schools which were identified through scientific research.

Targets of the SEIP

The project was to achieve two targets; increase access to secondary education and improve the quality of teaching and learning at the secondary level. The interventions were carried out in231 schools and are as follows.

E-Blocks

Twenty-three (23) new secondary schools were built in districts that did not have secondary schools. These schools were designed and built in an E-shape with modern facilities. The SEIP also upgraded and built new facilities in 125 existing secondary schools which were considered as low performing schools across the country. This, increased the number of spaces available in the SEIP schools by over 43,000 seats between 2014 and 2021.b

The iBox/iCampusgh

The SEIP provided an online learning platform module for students called the iCampus. Over 1.1 million secondary school students have been provided with logins to access learning content on the iCampus daily. The iBox on the other hand is the offline version of the iCampus. The iBox also called the intelligent box, provides offline access to a range of curriculum-based video lessons, quizzes, virtual laboratories, and summary notes have been installed in all SEIP secondary schools. This intervention has helped to improve the quality of teaching and learning at the senior high school level.

School Mapping

A secondary school mapping portal has been created with the information of all thesenior secondary schools in Ghanato assist potential Junior High School students to make school choices and transition to higher secondary schools. The portal can be accessed on www.ghanaschools.org It provides the location of schools, programmes being offered and status, Day or Boarding of  thesecondary schools. Printed copies of the School Mapping Digest have been distributed to school heads and managers of education. This concept assisted in increasing access resulting in high enrolment in the SEIP schools.

Scholarships/Bursaries

Prior to the advent of the Free Senior High School Programme (fSHSP), some parents could not afford to pay fees for their ward’s secondary education. The SEIP offered scholarships which later became a bursary under the fSHSP to poor students from low-income households, especially girls. The support helped the students purchase some personal effects including sanitary materials in the case of the girls and the daily cost of transport to school for Day students. Tens of thousands of students who could otherwise have dropped from school benefited from the SEIP scholarships and bursaries.

Mathematics and Science for Sub-Saharan Africa (MS4SSA)

TheMoE and GES in collaboration with countries in Sub-Saharan Africa agreed on a common pedagogy on how to teach Science and mathematics in schools to make the sub-region’s graduates globally competitive. GES implemented the MS4SSA policyby establishing smart classrooms which are being used by teachers across the country. The policy introduced the teaching of coding, programming and robotics in schools.

Textbooks On Challenging Topics

A study of the Chief Examiner’s Reports over the years reveals students’ recurrent inability to answer questions from certain topics mostly from the four core subject areas; Mathematics, Integrated Science, English language and Social Studies. The SEIP therefore engaged some very experienced teachers and professors who simplified the teaching and learning of these challenging topics and put them in the form of textbooks which is currently being used by both teachers and students in secondary schools.

Training of Teachers

The teacher was the pivot around which the SEIP implementation revolved. They were taken through refresher courses on modern and improved methods of teaching and lesson delivery. The teachers were trained in all subject areas including the core and elective subjects and the results and impact of these trainings are felt in the academic performance of students in the project schools.

By: Cassandra Twum Ampofo

SEIP Communication Team Lead & Head, Public Relations Unit, GES HQ.