9th August 1909:

The School was founded in Accra as Accra Technical School, located at the premises of the Accountant General’s Department (current site of Kansu Secondary Technical School). The opening was done by Governor John Pickers gill Rodger on 19th August, 1909.

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June 1939:

The School was redesigned as Government Technical School and moved to its current site in Takoradi, with the completion of the iconic dormitory and classroom buildings around the famous Oval at the cost of £37,000. Packing from Accra begun in May 1939 and equipment transported to Takoradi by land from June to August 1939. Formal classes began at the site on 21st September 1939 under the leadership of Lt. Col. T.T. Gilbert as Acting Principal.

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January 1940: 

The first international students arrived on campus from Nigeria and Mahoney (now Republic of Benin)

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August 1940:

The School was relocated at Elmina Castle to make way for the Royal Air Force (RAF) with the outbreak of World War II. (A miniature nose of an aeroplane hangs at the entrance of the main classroom block, the old Administration Block, to commemorate the occupation by the Royal Air Force).

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January 1941: 

The 50 students returned to School resume classes in the Elmina Castle which had undergone some modifications to accommodate equipment and classrooms.

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May 1943:

The School was closed altogether so the Castle and the School’s equipment could be used for the technical branch of the military. All staff and most of the students were drafted into the military until the end of the hostilities.

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October 1945:

The Royal Air Force moved out of the School’s buildings in Takoradi, to pave the way for the return of the students to the present site under the headship of Major T.C. Watkins as Acting Principal.

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January 1950: 

The School began to gradually take shape with modest growth in numbers after the war, with 110 students, compared to as many as 80 ways back in 1928.  The curriculum principally comprised Engineering and Construction with English, Mathematics and Science as background subjects.

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January 1953:

The School was redesigned Government Secondary Technical School, with the drastic revision which was characterised by the introduction of a Secondary school curriculum and a five-year course was begun leading to the School Certificate Examination. The expansion included academic subjects like Physics, Chemistry, Elementary and Additional Mathematics, Geography and French. Art was introduced later.

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January 1954:

During the 1954 academic year, GSTS achieved another first, an Army Cadet Corps, the first of its kind in the then Gold Coast was established in the school with an initial twenty students. Currently the Corps has a school membership strength of about two-hundred and twenty-three (223) and a numerical strength of about sixty five thousand three-hundred and eighty (65,380) in all the ten regions of Ghana.

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Academic Year 1956/57:

Religious Knowledge, Music and History were brought in as non-examinable subjects, with the aim to broaden the intellectual base of students and to minimize what seemed to be narrow-mindedness among the products of the School.

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August 1958:

Mr. J.W.L. Mills took over as Headmaster from the last European head, Mr. F.E. Joselin.

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January 1961: 

Mr S M Adu-Ampoma took over from Mr Mills and steered the school through Ghana’s change of the academic year from January December to September-June during which students received double promotion. Mr Adu-Ampoma established the Government Secondary Technical School as one of the best and most disciplined schools in Ghana. In particular, his two Chemistry practical books, “Practical Analysis in Inorganic Chemistry and Volumetric Chemistry” became the standard text books for the West African Examinations Council’s General Certificate of Education Ordinary Level Chemistry ‘practical paper’.

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September 1961: 

Introduction of Sixth-Form education with Physics, Pure Mathematics and Chemistry or Physics, Pure Mathematics and Applied Mathematics combinations. Not only did Adu-Ampoma bring academic excellence but the school was also known throughout the Western Region and beyond, for the impeccable comportment of its students wherever they were (white-white on general or special exeat days), even on the trains and buses, as they went home or returned to school at the end of school holidays.

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September 1965: 

Introduction of art as an examinable subject at the General Certificate of Examination Ordinary Level. The sole student of the programme, Giant K A Essuman, created the cement sculptor known as “Mother Africa,” for his General Certificate of Education Ordinary Level practical examination project in 1967. Giant Essuman returned to Sixth From to read Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics and eventually read Architecture at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi.

The Form One intake of the 1965-66 academic year joined the first group of Ghanaian students to take the joint General Certificate of Examination (GCE ‘O’ Levels) and the re-introduced School Certificate Examination in 1970.

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3rd November 1965: 

The late Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, first President of the Republic of Ghana, announced that the Government Secondary Technical School would be adopted and turned into an Air Force Training College. According to the policy, students in the School were to be given the opportunity as are appropriate and suitable, to prepare them for careers in the Ghana Air Force and Civil Aviation Authority. This policy seemed to have been born out of the fact that Giants who had joined the Ghana Air Force and Civil Aviation as Air Traffic Controllers were performing excellently in those fields.

Following the announcement, aero-modelling and gliding was introduced as one of the Saturday morning ‘Hobbies’ activities in the school and thrived for a few years.

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September 1966: 

Saw the first batch of GSTS students who offered Biology as an examinable subject at the General Certificate of Education, Ordinary Level. This would ultimately lead to the now fully fledged Physical and Biological Sciences education at the School in place of the old Physical Sciences and Technical Education Curriculum. This addition has led to a number of Giants of that age going into Medicine and Pharmacy, even though a few students of the old programme(s) of the 1950s, 60s and 70s still went on to read Medicine and even Law after GSTS.

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November 1969:

With the coming into office of the Progress Party in October of that year, the government decided to hand over the two Government schools GSTS and Government Secondary School at Tamale and Peki Training College to Board of Directors. GSTS had elected a School Council earlier in September for the first time in its history. The Government had already decided on the matter, but what to call the school, now without direct government control through the Ministry of Education was the matter to debate.

Various acronyms were considered, but the Students’ Council on behalf of the general student body opted for “Ghana” in place of “Government” so the famous short form, “GSTS” could be maintained. Therefore, from the 1970-71 academic year, the school assumed its current name Ghana Secondary Technical School.

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23 April 1971: 

The 1965 pronouncement to turn the School into an Air Force Academy was placed on the back burner following the Coup d’état of February 1966 until sometime during early part of the year when Air Marshall M. A. Otu (formerly Lt. General) and Senior Officers of the Military Division of the Ministry of Defence visited the school on to clarify the intention of the military’s involvement in the school.

As a result of the visit, the 1972-73 academic year the first batch of students were admitted to do a two-year military sixth-form course. These young military officers of were sponsored the Ghana Armed Forces to pursue the Sixth Form education at GSTS, with the aim of enlisting them after their A Levels. The programme started with an intake of 15 from the then Military Academy and Training School. The programme was made up of a combination of regular academic work and sandwiched military training during the school holidays. This unique arrangement, similar to the United States of America’s Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) programme, was rather short-lived as it was discontinued after the very first batch.

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The Great Era: With the various changes in previous decades, the course of the school’s history in the seemed to suggest that everything had fallen in place by the late 1960s. By this time, the School’s curricula had undergone all the relevant changes and stabilised. The School was doing very well academically and in extra-curricula activities as well.

According to a report on comparison of secondary schools in Ghana based on the results of the General Certificate of Education for the years 1966 to 1968, GSTS came first overall in 1966 with 80.4%, third in 1967 with 58.2% and second in 1968 with 71.5%. In terms of candidates who passed in five or more subjects over the same period, GSTS came first with 68.7% overall.

ln sports, the School was always taking the first position in athletics in the Western Regional Inter-Schools and Colleges Athletics competitions, while rubbing shoulders with other schools in hockey, football, basketball and the rest. This excellence in athletics continue to this day.

During the 1962-63 academic year, the School won the National Inter-schools and Colleges Hockey competition by beating Winneba Secondary School in the finals of the competition after a tough semi-final win over the Presbyterian Boys’ Secondary School then based in Krobo-Odumase.

There were a number of clubs and societies to take care of both the social and academic life of the students. The upward surge in the reputation of the school brought other problems in its wake. The chief of these being the pressure on the school for admission and consequently on the facilities of the school.

In later years, the School won the prestigious Ghana National Science and Mathematics Quiz competition for the first time in June, 2012. They were runners-up in 2001 and 2014.

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Centenary: 

In October 2009, the School celebrated its centenary that culminated in  a grand durbar and Speech and Prize Giving ceremony for which the Guest Speaker was one of its most celebrated products, Dr Kingsley Y Amoako, the former Executive Secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, with another Giant and Minister for Mines and Natural Resources, Mr Mike Hammah as Chairman for the occasion.

A fund-raising Dinner Dance organised for the Saturday of the celebration was attended by Giants from all over the world, including two members of the very first 1961-62 Sixth Form class and a Deputy Chief of Defence Staff of the Ghana Armed Forces.

The Sunday Thanksgiving Service to round off the celebrations was officiated by a Giant Minister of the Methodist Church Ghana, Very Rev Abedu Quarshie, which showed how very diverse the products of the school that was originally established to provide middle level technical personnel for the British Colonial Service in West Africa, had become after one hundred years.

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New Challenges:

Over the years, many parents have fought tooth and nail to seek admission for their wards without considering whether their children could make it through the science and particularly, the technical courses. The school authorities of the time gave in to pragmatism and created classes for General Arts. Students who could not cope with science were given the opportunity to read the general arts to the ordinary level. For a while the school carried on successfully until it became evident that the authorities had bitten more than the School’s limited infrastructural capacity could manage in allowing the general arts which had been optional for many years, to be taken to final examination levels. The intense pressure on the time-table became increasingly unbearable. In 1985, therefore, a bold decision was taken to drop the general arts programme, with the last batch of full arts students passing out in 1986.

With the introduction of the Senior Secondary School system in 1990, however, the school authorities realised they could not run continue to avoid the maxim, “Variety is the spice of life.” Therefore, the general arts programme was reinstituted.

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GSTS was established to provide middle, and later, high level technical man-power for the Gold Coast and later, independent Ghana. This objective was achieved to perfection by the school for nearly a century. With the pressures that were brought on school places as a result of the introduction of the Senior Secondary Education System, GSTS in particular, has suffered unduly because of the extreme over population. This has led in part, to the tearing down of the iconic metal and woodwork shops that defined the School, to make room for classrooms.

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Reorganisation: With the recent inauguration of national, regional, local and global old students’ associations, under the umbrella GSTS Alumni Association (GAA), it the hope that the Association would lead a stakeholders drive to restore technical education in the School and return it to its rightful place as the premier science and technical secondary institution in Africa .

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GIANTS LET'S STAND TALL !!!