The Executive Director of the Institute of Education Studies, Dr. Peter Anti Partey, says Ghana must change the way it discusses WASSCE performance and move away from broad national explanations that do little to fix the problem.
Speaking on Metro TV’s Inside Pages with Michael Kofi Oduro on Saturday, December 6, Dr. Anti Partey said this year’s results point to a deeper challenge that requires careful school-by-school scrutiny rather than the usual national debate.
He explained that poor WASSCE outcomes have serious consequences for young people, noting that many students who do not perform well are “stuck for a while before they can progress.”
“Well, I feel very sad because, you see, WASSCE is positioned in such a way that the students’ future prospects heavily relied on his or her performance during that period,” he said.
“When the students’ performance is like this, it means that most of them are going to be stuck… before they can progress,” he noted.
He expressed concern that students with weak results often struggle to find opportunities.
“In this country, nobody would be willing to employ somebody with an SS certificate,” he pointed out.
“And to even make it worse, the certificates will have grades that are not… good.”
According to him, this leads many young people to spend years rewriting private exams before they can apply to tertiary institutions, a situation he believes contributes to unemployment and slows national human capital development.
Dr. Anti Partey said although every year people rush to explain the causes of poor results, the country has been “doing the same things for some time now,” without any real improvement.
He argued that national pass rates can be misleading because they mask wide differences in performance across schools.
“What WAEC does is that they try to put the pass rate for each individual school… and then they strike the average to get the national average,” he explained.
“If we see that the national average is low, it means that individual schools are not performing.”
He called for what he described as a “micro-level analysis” to understand what is happening in specific schools, especially those that consistently perform poorly and those that traditionally perform well but dropped this year.
“There are schools that always score between zero and 20% for the past six years,” he said.
“What this result tells us is that those that are always performing low were not able to improve… and sadly, those that perform higher were also not able to pull up.”
Dr. Anti Partey said he does not oppose people suggesting reasons for the decline, but insisted that this year, stakeholders must “hasten slowly” and avoid jumping to conclusions.
He likened the needed approach to a doctor treating patients individually rather than assuming everyone in the waiting room has the same illness.
“Let’s not lump all schools together,” he said. “I would want us to do a micro kind of analysis.”
Dr. Anti Partey believes taking this route will help Ghana better understand the root causes of the decline and design interventions that actually work for each school.
