Nigeria has six years of Senior High School education
67 percent of Ghanaians passed maths in WASSCE 2020
Don’t view WASSE performance through a partisan lens- Salamat
A member of the National Education Assessment Unit and a former headteacher, Samuel Salamat, has raised concerns on the performance of Ghanaian students in the West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) compared to that of other West-African Countries.
According to a Citinewsroom report, Mr. Salamat, stated he has been monitoring Ghana’s performance in the WASSCE for the past three years and feels Ghana has not been able to keep pace with other English-speaking West-African countries including Nigeria and The Gambia.
He compared the mathematics results of Nigeria in 2020, to that of Ghana, noting that, 75 percent of Nigerian students passed core mathematics in 2020, as against 67 percent 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 bemoaned on The Point of View.
He however stressed that this “is an issue that we need to look at from a holistic perspective.”
Mr. Salamat also urged Ghanaians not to view WASSCE performances through a partisan lens.
“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.”
Director of Africa Education Watch, Kofi Asare, also speaking on the show 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.”
Mr. Asare also noted that the key difference between the educational system in Ghana and Nigeria is that, their secondary school education is six years while Ghana’s is 3 years
“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,” he added.
