Ghana is trailing Nigeria in the WASSCE performance – Former headteacher
The performance of Ghanaian Senior High School students in the 2021 West Africa Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) has been a source of worry for Mr Salamat a former headteacher as he complained that Ghana is gradually losing ground to their West African counterparts Nigeria in terms of performance.
Mr Salamat is a member of the National Education Assessment Unit where they have been tracking Ghana’s performance in the WASSCE for the past three years.
He lamented that Ghana has not been able to keep pace with their Nigerian and The Gambian counterparts. He noted that 75 per cent of Nigerian students passed core Maths in 2020, as against 67 per cent of Ghanaian students.
“Population-wise, they [Nigeria] are more than us so if they are doing better than us, then our competitiveness at the international arena is a problem,” he added that
Mr. Salamat stressed that this “is an issue that we need to look at from a holistic perspective” and urged Ghanaians not to view WASSCE performances through partisan lenses.
“We will need to look at it as Ghanaians and not based on partisanship. We should see education as a public good.”
“If something has not gone on well, we should all see it as a collective failure on our part. If something has gone on well, we should all see it as a collective success.”
Also speaking on the show, the Executive Director of Africa Education Watch, Kofi Asare, noted that Ghana is seeing these struggles because “we haven’t taken basic education seriously.”
“If we don’t strengthen basic education and not see basic education as a priority and continue to focus on secondary education, then I’m sorry.”
He indicated that a key difference between Ghana and Nigeria is that they have six years of secondary education.
“So it means that even if basic education is not of that much quality, the child has six years of much more supervised learning in secondary schools.”
By: Stella Annan | myactiveonline.com Twitter @activetvgh
