President urges Free SHS Students to ensure exemplary WASSCE results

By Iddi Yire, GNA

Accra, March 16, GNA – President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has encouraged the first batch of final year Free Senior High School (SHS) students to work hard and score higher grades in their West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE).

He advised them to make good use of the sets of past questions and answer booklets procured from the West Africa Examination Council (WAEC) to help them in their studies.

President Akufo-Addo gave the advice in a speech read on his behalf during the 89th Speech and Prize Giving Day of Accra Academy on the “The Impact of Education on Nation Building in a Thriving Digital World”.

“Already, you are in a school with a solid reputation for excellent WASSCE results,” he stated.

“This year’s results should even be better than last year’s, so that, together, we can shame the detractors and those who do not want the policy to succeed. I have utmost confidence that you will rise to the challenge.”

He said Ghanaians needed to recognise that the only way to create opportunities for all nations’ youth, and build potential was through access to quality, and accessible education.

He said it was the fastest and most effective way to change the fortunes of African continent, and join the group of developed nations and continents.

“We everyday lament the fact that we started from the same pedestal as nations like Malaysia, Singapore and South Korea. The truth is that they have made it simply by wiping out illiteracy and empowering a generation of citizens with education and the skills to power their nations’ development.”

President Akufo-Addo said citizens could only make informed choices if they were empowered with the capacity to make those choices.

He said in a fundamental sense, education was the key to human development and to widening life's options for individuals and society as a whole.

President Akufo-Addo said market women and fishermen, farmers and traders, entrepreneurs and workers, taxi drivers and artisans, hawkers and kayayei, and, indeed, every mother and father, all hope that education would help their children escape poverty and give them access to a good life.

He said before September 2017, an average of 100,000 Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) graduates, who were placed in public senior high schools each year, did not take up their place.

He said this meant that, in the next decade, about one million of the nation’s young men and women would have had their education terminated at junior high school.

He said such a situation was totally unacceptable, and, the more reason why he was determined to end it.

The President said the Free SHS was ensuring that all the nation’s children would be educated to at least secondary level, and money or the lack of it, no longer means a denial of education.

“Today, 1.2 million children, the highest enrolment of pupils in SHS in our history, are benefitting from the policy, which has been hailed all over the nation.”

“I believe that the cost of providing free secondary school education is cheaper than the cost of the alternative of an uneducated and unskilled workforce that has the capacity to retard our development.

“Leadership is about choices – I have chosen to invest in the future of our youth and of our country,” the President stated.

GNA

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