Although he finds the Free Senior High School (SHS) idea to be admirable, he is concerned that it falls short in terms of teacher development and equipping students with the skills they need for the workforce or further education.
At the 2023 version of Achimota Speaks on Thursday at the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, Prof. Essuman made this statement as the keynote speaker.
"The Governance, Management, and Financing of Secondary Education in Ghana" was the event's subject.
The debate over free secondary education focuses more on access than it does on expected outcomes and course material. Less emphasis is placed on issues related to skill development, teacher orientation, reorientation, training, and development, as well as novel pedagogical methods. Obviously, paying close attention to all of these will likely result in students who are prepared to move to either the tertiary level or the working world.
"The policy of making secondary education free and available to all is a lofty one, but such a goal will be useless and needlessly expensive if all it does is create opportunity and give young people access without the skills that will make them great assets for the nation development," he continued.
According to Prof. Essuman, who is also the Dean of Education and Entrepreneurship at Methodist University College in Ghana, the country's free secondary education program is being implemented poorly.
He attributes the numerous setbacks that have plagued such efforts to this.
"A gradualist strategy and phased execution of the program might have been preferable when implementing free secondary education in Ghana. It's possible that improved management of the policy resulted from learning from other nations' experiences.
"With the issue of insufficient resources and delays in releasing funds to schools, a mean testing approach that targeted the weak and the poor could have been adopted. I don't believe that our nation has many choices.
