Effect of alternative disciplinary approach on student discipline the case of St. Augustine’s Senior High School

Abstract

Many stakeholders in Ghana’s educational sector are troubled by the seemingly high level of indiscipline in Ghana’s pre-tertiary schools, especially the Senior High Schools (SHS). The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of alternative disciplinary approach (GES Positive Discipline toolkit) on student discipline in St. Augustine’s SHS in the Prestea-Huni Valley Municipality. After six years of banning corporal punishment in pre-tertiary schools and four years of implementing the GES toolkit, it was expedient to assess its impact on student discipline. This study used the descriptive survey design and applied the homogeneous purposive sampling procedure to obtain a sample size of 30 teachers out of a population of 64 teachers. The researcher designed questionnaire which was used for data collection. The study used descriptive statistics such as frequencies, means, standard deviation and percentages to analyze its data. The study found that student discipline was worse after the introduction of the GES toolkit. The GES toolkit had a negative impact on student discipline in St. Augustine’s SHS. The study showed that the low level of knowledge of teachers on the GES toolkit led to a low level of regularity and efficiency of usage of the toolkit by teachers, thus producing a low level of student discipline in the school. The study recommends that both GES and school management of SHS should educate teachers on the GES toolkit to enhance their regularity and efficiency of usage to generate a positive impact on student discipline in the SHS