School leaders' coping mechanisms to confront reform implementation challenges: Evidence from Ghana's ‘Free SHS’ policy

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.