GES to crack down on lavish school celebrations with new standardisation guidelines

Ghana’s Education Service has signalled its intention to rein in what it characterises as an escalating culture of conspicuous consumption at school events, announcing the formation of a committee tasked with devising uniform standards for celebrations across all senior high schools nationwide.

The announcement came during a press conference on Monday, June 22, where Director-General Professor Ernest Kofi Davis outlined the rationale for what amounts to a direct challenge to what he sees as a troubling trend of wealth-flaunting on educational premises.

The committee will be charged with scrutinising every form of celebration that takes place within school walls — from formal speech days to prize-giving ceremonies — and will emerge with a set of guidelines designed to ensure consistency and propriety across institutions.

“A committee will be formed to review all celebrations on school premises, including speech and prize-giving days, and come out with guidelines to ensure standardisation,” Prof. Davis stated, framing the effort as a response to mounting problems arising from such events.

The underlying concern animating this move centres on the transformation of school ceremonies into showcases for material excess.

Parents, guardians and well-wishers have increasingly used these occasions as platforms to present expensive gifts and engage in displays of opulence that, in the Education Service’s view, fundamentally contradict the institution’s pedagogical mission.

“The rationale for this directive is to tell parents, guardians, and all guardians for that matter that excessive show of wealth on school premises is not the kind of value GES wants to project and prioritise amongst students,” Prof. Davis explained.

The Education Service envisions schools as spaces where modesty, self-discipline and the principle of equal access should reign supreme — environments where a student’s worth is not measured against the cost of gifts their family can afford to lavish upon them.

To ensure the directives take root, responsibility has been distributed across the system’s hierarchy. School principals will be expected to police their own campuses rigorously, while regional education directors will serve as supervisors, monitoring whether institutions are adhering to the new standard.

“We expect strict enforcement by school authority and supervision by all regional directors,” Prof. Davis made clear.

The Education Service has also extended an appeal directly to parents and guardians, asking them to resist the impulse toward extravagance and instead maintain the more restrained approach to celebrations that, the Service argues, should define school life.

“Parents are therefore expected to comply with this directive and make sure that they do not break their old practice of modest celebrations,” he urged.

Recognising that institutional change requires buy-in from multiple quarters, Prof. Davis cast a wide net in appealing for support.

Teachers, school administrators, traditional leaders, media outlets and the broader public have all been enlisted in the effort to stem what he described as an emerging phenomenon — the normalisation of lavish gift-giving and extravagant display within educational settings.

The forthcoming guidelines are intended to furnish schools with a concrete framework for how to structure their celebrations while simultaneously safeguarding the core educational values that the Service insists must remain at the heart of the school experience.

Yaw Opoku Amoako

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