School leaders' coping mechanisms to confront reform implementation challenges: Evidence from Ghana's ‘Free SHS’ policy
Authors: Chanimbe Timothy , Ayi‐Bonte Aurelia Naa Ayikaikor 
Published: February 2025

Remediating unaffordable and inequitable access to secondary education precipitated Ghana's introduction of the ‘Free Senior High School (SHS)’ policy. The existing scholarship has done a good job tracing the implementation gaps created by this reform. Considering the importance of local actors, whose contribution to the sustenance of the policy is often diminished by the policy’s overly political approach to implementation, a crucial matter to tap is how school leaders are filling the implementation gaps ab initio. This study undertakes the aforementioned task, and investigates whether school type influences the kind/type of resources or strategies to fill the implementation gaps withal. The theory of educational change undergirds the study, seeking evidence to complement the existing literature by highlighting the critical role of local actors, in this case the significant role school leaders and administrators play in addressing challenges within equity‐based educational policies. Per our results, principals' varying initiatives and their reachable actors also depend on school type. In terms of soliciting donations from actors within the external environment, low‐tier schools particularly obtained vital support from non‐governmental organisations while first‐rate schools mobilised resources from parents and alumni groups. A synopsis of our qualitative evidence further unveils how government's delay in releasing groceries made the latter obtainable by borrowing or buying on credit to feed students in the early years of the reform's implementation. When these approaches became redundant, the quantity and quality of meals were reduced due to either insufficiency or the quest to keep stockpiles for future. Government's delays in paying its farmers led to acute food shortages. As such, strategic principals clandestinely lobbied these government‐contracted farmers with side‐payments to provide groceries or obtained foodstuffs with upfront payments via funding from informal sources. Given the exiguity of food, schools with campus residential facilities exchanged essential food items with neighbouring schools. For the preponderant infrastructure deficits, some principals reverted to the use of abandoned or uncompleted buildings. In other cases, large halls were partitioned for multiple use while those with undersized structures resorted to shift systems.

Context and Implications

Rationale for this study: When the cost‐sharing model (where education cost is split between guardians and government) of secondary education financing became deficient in ensuring equitable access to schooling, Ghana's ‘Free SHS’ policy was introduced to reduce ‘stunted’ entry vis‐à‐vis addressing equity concerns regarding affordability. The existing scholarship has particularly fixated on the implementation gaps in schools but emerging studies exploring how principals address these gaps remain barely highlighted and even more fragmented. While this discourse discerns how principals fill the implementation gaps created by the reform, it unearths whether school type really matters in attaining solutions to these challenges. Secondarily, the paper seeks to highlight how other ‘local actors’ assist in filling reform implementation gaps.

Why the new findings matter: This study adds to the new strand of knowledge on what principals do when confronted with difficult situations vis‐à‐vis demonstrating their adaptability to change. The knowledge serves as a guide to educators or practitioners on various ways to mitigate reform implementation challenges. The peculiar strategies of schools' context provide insight into ways localised policies can be more context‐sensitive in design to help implement a national educational policy. Our results therefore build on a core body of work strengthening the evidence based on the role local actors play in mitigating policy implementation challenges. These insights inform future policies as it echoes the needs of schools in very distinct contexts. The new knowledge directly or indirectly appeals to other external actors to come to the aid of schools in need. At the very least, our findings open the black box to establish causal mechanisms between school type and the kind/type of strategy/resources for filling policy implementation gaps. Hence, scholars can assess these relationships in the cost‐sharing systems. Since government cannot address all the implementation gaps of such an ambitious policy, our findings highlight the importance of local actors, whose contributions to the sustenance of the policy is often diminished by the policy's overly political approach to implementation. Questionably, might the absence of assistance from alumni groups to low‐tier schools be as a result of low‐academic performance, which in the long run determines who becomes capable to assist their alma mater?

Implications for policy makers and funders: The findings offer valuable policy implications, particularly in the context of tackling educational inequalities in the attainment of global education goals in developing countries. The vital policy insights the results yield are that if this new reform must reach the institutionalisation phase where implementation can go uninterrupted, policy makers must at least release edibles on time while addressing the capital expenditure concerns of schools. For equity implications, the results cry for non‐governmental organisations (funders) to come to the rescue of some first‐rate schools rather than focusing solely on the low‐tier ones. Impliedly, there is the need to address the resource disparities between elite and low‐ranked schools. As a policy perspicacity, the government's vigilance to ensure Parent Teacher Association dues are not sneaked back into secondary schools is commendable not to curtail entry and completion. But, as our results demonstrate, room must be created for voluntary contributions from parents given the government's inability to shoulder all cost associated with students.