“If senior high school education is free and equitably distributed, shouldn’t we ask the children about it?”

Abstract

Ghana is one of the few countries with prior cost-sharing funding approaches to upper secondary education to have rolled out a completely free upper secondary education policy. Whilst the empirical foundation of the emerging body of studies on the policy includes policy makers, implementers and a reliance on policy documents, the perspectives of children who are the key beneficiaries of the policy has remained rarely explored. In this paper, I present children’s experiences of access to upper secondary education and how that informs their perspective of the free SHS policy. Using Interpretive Phenomenological Approach as both a method for data collection and analysis, the study argues that children have contrasting views about the ability of the policy to enable equitable access to upper secondary education. Whilst children from wealthy families believe the policy enables equitable access, those from poor homes believe the policy is poor for poor people. Until the policy acknowledges the diversity among children and account for variations in tandem with the context specificity of each student, upper secondary education will remain an elusive goal to several children from poor social backgrounds despite the free and equitable aspiration of the policy.