The Chief Executive Officer of the Mulan Resource Centre, Thara Brigitte Mills Simmonds, has called on Ghana’s education stakeholders to give children’s emotional wellbeing the same attention as academic achievement.
She made the appeal in Accra during the launch of the Pyramid Social Emotional Learning Programme, saying good grades alone could not guarantee a child’s complete development.
Mills Simmonds said schools needed to treat emotional health, relationships and behaviour as essential parts of education if pupils were to learn, develop and flourish. She warned that children’s emotional difficulties were often missed in a system heavily focused on examination results.
A child may be academically gifted, she said, but still struggle to control their emotions, build healthy relationships, communicate their needs, resolve disagreements, demonstrate empathy or manage the pressures of everyday life.
She described the Pyramid Model as a structured approach to supporting children’s social, emotional and behavioural development. The model, she explained, was not intended to replace Ghana’s existing curriculum, but to strengthen the environment in which children learn and grow.
The programme is designed to bring together government agencies, teachers, practitioners, parents and development partners around a shared objective: ensuring that every child has the opportunity to learn, feel a sense of belonging and flourish.
During the launch, Mills Simmonds spoke openly about her personal connection to the issue. She revealed that she had been a child who performed well academically while privately dealing with emotional and social pressures.
For her, unveiling the programme represented more than the introduction of a new educational initiative. She said it felt like presenting the result of the difficulties she had experienced herself.
That experience, Mills Simmonds added, had strengthened her belief that Ghana’s schools needed a clear and deliberate system for identifying children’s emotional needs and responding to them before those needs were overlooked.
She also raised concerns about the growing impact of emotional and mental health pressures on young people. Many children, she said, struggled not because they lacked intelligence, but because there was no effective system to recognise what they were experiencing or provide the necessary support.
Mills Simmonds connected that shortfall with tragic outcomes involving students. In her view, the problem was not a lack of academic ability, but the absence of a structure capable of identifying children who were suffering beneath the surface.
She expressed hope that the Pyramid Model would be carefully adapted to Ghana’s cultural and educational circumstances. The launch, she said, should be seen as the beginning of a broader national discussion about emotional wellbeing, supportive classrooms and stronger partnerships between schools, families and communities.
Mills Simmonds concluded by restating her belief that Ghana’s education system should prepare every child to succeed academically, emotionally and socially.
She said the central aim was to ensure that all children had the opportunity to belong and thrive.
