President John Dramani Mahama has, as part of his Resetting Ghana Tour of the Upper East Region, commissioned the E-Block of the Paga Senior High School (SHS) in the Kassena-Nankana West District.

President Mahama said one of the major policies under the Resetting Ghana Agenda was to improve quality and access to education at all levels, including secondary education.

He assured the community of the government's decision to provide the school with a 60-seater bus, a boys' dormitory, a girls' dormitory, and a dining hall.

The President said that before they came into office, there was a challenge with feeding Senior High School students, saying, "We have largely resolved that challenge. The quantity and quality of food have improved.”

He noted that, "Government previously had no dedicated funding for Free SHS. We have created dedicated and continuous funding for the programme, and so the quality of education is getting better."

Touching on the issue of abandoned projects, President Mahama said they started the E-Block concept during his first term to expand access to secondary education because they realised that the little over 500 secondary schools available at the time were not enough to contain the number of children expected under the Free SHS programme.

He said they wanted to accelerate the construction of 200 new E-Blocks for the children to have enough space in secondary schools, and not to allow the system to end up in double track.

"Unfortunately, our colleagues did not agree with us. When they came into office, they fast-tracked Free SHS without any major expansion of the existing secondary schools and abandoned all the E-Block projects we had started," he stated.

"It resulted in a double-track system. This government has come, and by 2027, no secondary school in Ghana will be operating the double-track system. All SHS children would go to school at the same time and vacate at the same time.”

He said they would also have the same amount of teacher contact hours because they had realised that one of the factors affecting Free SHS was the reduced contact hours between students and their teachers.

The President said the end of the double-track system would increase student-teacher contact hours and improve the performance of our students in the WASSCE.

He said through the Secondary Education Transformation for Access, Relevance, and Results for Jobs (STARR-J) project, the Government would make available GH¢3 billion for the expansion of secondary education to end the congestion in the nation's secondary schools and end the double-track system.

He said in next year's budget, the Government would build another 30 new secondary schools across the country to be in high-population-density areas.

The Minister of Education, Haruna Iddrisu, announced that under the President's leadership and guidance, the Free SHS initiative of the previous Government had been reviewed, and the President had taken monumental decisions to safeguard and expand secondary education.