Ghana is one of the few countries with prior cost-sharing funding approaches to upper secondary education to have rolled out a completely free upper secondary education policy. Whilst the empirical foundation of the emerging body of studies on the policy includes policy makers, implementers and a reliance on policy documents, the perspectives of children who are the key beneficiaries of the policy has remained rarely explored. In this paper, I present children’s experiences of access to upper secondary education and how that informs their perspective of the free SHS policy. Using Interpretive Phenomenological Approach as both a method for data collection and analysis, the study argues that children have contrasting views about the ability of the policy to enable equitable access to upper secondary education. Whilst children from wealthy families believe the policy enables equitable access, those from poor homes believe the policy is poor for poor people. Until the policy acknowledges the diversity among children and account for variations in tandem with the context specificity of each student, upper secondary education will remain an elusive goal to several children from poor social backgrounds despite the free and equitable aspiration of the policy.

中文翻译：

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“如果高中教育是免费且分配公平的，我们不应该问孩子们这个问题吗？”

加纳是少数几个先前对高中教育采取费用分摊资助方式并推出完全免费高中教育政策的国家之一。虽然新兴政策研究的实证基础包括政策制定者、实施者和对政策文件的依赖，但作为政策主要受益者的儿童的观点仍然很少被探讨。在本文中，我介绍了儿童接受高中教育的经历，以及这些经历如何影响他们对免费 SHS 政策的看法。该研究使用解释现象学方法作为数据收集和分析的方法，认为儿童对于政策能否实现平等接受高中教育的能力持有不同的看法。虽然来自富裕家庭的孩子认为该政策能够实现公平的机会，但来自贫困家庭的孩子认为该政策对穷人来说很糟糕。在政策承认儿童的多样性并考虑到每个学生的具体情况的差异之前，尽管政策希望实现自由和公平，但对于一些来自贫困社会背景的儿童来说，高中教育仍然是一个难以实现的目标。