CHAPTER 3
Education Reform History
Education Reform: 1951–2008 From 1951 to 2005, enactment of fee-free, compulsory basic education was on the agenda of most governments. Up until 1987, these efforts were punctuated by periods of economic and political distress resulting in setbacks in basic education financing, quality and access. In 1952, the Ghanaian government announced the introduction of fee-free primary education under an Accelerated Development Plan for Education. The 1961 Education Act was introduced to reinforce the commitment to free primary education. During this period and related to these initiatives, primary enrollment increased sevenfold, growing from 153,360 (1951) to 1,137,495 (1966) primary school students over a 15-year time span (Foobih and Koomson 1998). However, in the late 1970s, the Ghanaian economy and consequently the education system retracted due to institutional mismanagement and poor economic policy (Akyeampong et al. 2006). From 1976 to 1983, the proportion of GDP allocated to the education sector sank from 6.4 percent to about 1.5 percent (World Bank 2004). As a result of scarce financial resources, textbooks and other school materials became in short supply, school infrastructure deteriorated and the necessary data for strategy, planning and policy purposes were not compiled anymore (Akyeampong et al. 2006). In the years following 1975, when over 2.3 million children attended primary schooling, sectorwide deterioration led to a decline in enrollment of over one million children by the early eighties (World Bank 2004). Thompson and Casely-Hayford (2008, 10) note: As government funding plummeted, the sector was also weakened by the braindrain that had hit the rest of the economy as a result of the deteriorating social and economic conditions in the country. By 1983, approximately 50 percent of trained primary school teachers had left the country. (Ahadzie 2000, 20, qtd. in Thompson and Casely-Hayford)
To address teacher shortages, the government began hiring large numbers of underqualified teachers. Foobih and Koomson (1998, 166) add, “The state of Ghana’s education system by 1985 was aptly described as clinically dead.”
Basic Education beyond the Millennium Development Goals in Ghana 41 http://dx.doi.org/10.1596/978-1-4648-0098-6