President directs Education Minister to investigate poor basic education

President John Dramani Mahama is tracing the failure recorded in this year’s West Africa Secondary Certificate Examination (WASSCE) to the neglect of basic education in the last couple of years.

He said the state’s inability to promptly pay the capitation grant and ensure quality teachers were deployed to the basic level affected teaching and learning at that level, hence impacted the preparedness of pupils for higher studies.

“It is that level that prepares the child for secondary and tertiary education. Our focus must be on foundational learning,” President Mahama stated.

He made this diagnosis in Accra yesterday when he launched the STEM Box, an initiative to distribute a set of tools kit for students in basic four, five, and six.

Data released by the West Africa Examination Council shows that nearly half of the 446,352 candidates who sat for the examination failed the core subjects of mathematics, general science, and social studies.

According to him, the results should serve as an eye-opener on the need to equally prioritise basic education in preparing pupils for the future.

“Once you don’t get that level right, you’ll just send the child through a conveyor belt like a factory and when it comes out at the end, it will be picked up by quality control and it’ll be noted that this one does not meet the standards,” he inferred.

He explained that if the country took foundational learning seriously, by the time a child reaches primary school, he should be able to read properly, write properly, and do basic arithmetic by the time he leaves primary school.

“If we are able to get our children to get these three things right, then they have the foundation to continue into secondary education; otherwise, it will be like a factory that we are just pushing them through and at the end of it, you’ll have the situation where a child finishes basic school and sometimes still finds it difficult to write his name.”

Vigilance and invigoration, President Mahama said, will not go away and so “we must make sure that the children are well prepared to on their own be able to study and pass the exams.”

He said government and all stakeholders were concerned about the outcome of the examination and steps would be taken to unearth what may have caused it.

“I have asked the minister of education to do an analysis of the examiners’ report to try to decipher what could have gone so disastrously wrong. It is mind-boggling that with the same teachers and same factors in play, just from one batch to the other, one batch does so disastrously. We need to get to the bottom of it,” he emphasised.

The Minister of Education, Haruna Iddrisu, said regrettable as the results may be, the wrongs that may have caused the failure would be righted.

Mr Iddrisu, MP, Tamale South, said his outfit’s commitment to quality education would remain unparalleled.

BY JULIUS YAO PETETSI

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