The Executive Director of Challenging Heights, Mr James Kofi Annan, has called on the government to review the policy of granting subsidy to all students in senior high schools. According to him, the policy should be reviewed to favour needy students, since about 90 per cent of students that qualified to enter senior school came from private basic schools, where they paid high school fees. Mr Annan told the Daily Graph¬ic that parents of such children could afford to pay their fees at the senior high level, and, should; there¬fore, be allowed to do so. Rather, he said, those who could not afford to pay the fees should benefit from the subsidy. He said the wholesale subsidy to all senior high school students was a drain on government revenue and that some of the funds spent to cover all senior high school students could have been used to put up or expand infrastructure. He said the educational system needed to be looked at again, in terms of the provision of infrastructure and other forms of logistics. Mr Annan said,' for instance, public schools should be strengthened to enable them to compete favourably with the private ones, and that one way through which that could be done was the handover of public missions schools to the missions. He said the issue of poor supervision and management were some of the causes that led to most public basic schools performing poorly in the Basic Educational Certificate Examination (BECE). The missions, he said, managed schools well, and, therefore, called on government to handover the missions schools to ensure efficient and effective management to raise the standards and reverse the poor performance of students at the BECE. Mr Annan said the missions should be able to determine who would teach and who would head such schools. "This would bring some public confidence in the public basic schools," he said. He commended the government for the increase in the Capitation Grant from GH¢ 3 to GH¢ 4.5, adding that although the grant had gone up, the increase was not enough since the public schools still had a lot to grapple with. Mr Annan said the grant should have been increased to about GH¢ 10 since a lot went into the management of schools. He said a survey conducted in some public basic schools indicated that examination questions were written on the blackboard, attributing the problem to the inadequacy of the capitation grant. The budgetary allocation to schools, he said, should be released on time to enable heads to plan ahead and secure the necessary logistics to ensure smooth academic activities. Mr Annan deplored the politicisation of the education system and stressed the need for a clear-cut direction of the country's educational system. He called for a national forum to discuss such issues adding that a research conducted by the Ghana National Education Campaign Coalition (GNECC) indicated that about 800,000 children were out of school. Source: Daily Guide