The General Secretary of the Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT), Thomas Musah, has called for a sober reflection of the performance of students in the 2025 West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) for School Candidates (SC).
He said there was a need to avoid the blame game and stop using the performance of the candidates as a political football.
“Let us have some sober reflection and see how best we can help our children to become the best that God has destined for them to become,” he said.
Following the release of the results, he said there had been several issues and analyses that had come up, with some saying that there was strict invigilation that caused teachers to come under attacks for not allowing candidates to cheat.
Reflection
Others, he said, had also indicated that this year’s examination gave a true reflection of the performance of candidates due to the measures that were put in place, including the strict invigilation.
“There are a whole lot of factors that go into determining things like this.
Some of them could be the way the questions were set… the other one could be about the invigilation aspect, some of the things could be the way they approach the answering of the questions or the understanding of the questions and how they attempted and how they went about answering them and all that,” he said.
With the Chief Examiner's Report, he said all the loopholes would be pointed out to them and that teachers could then use that to guide and help students in the preparations towards their examination.
“It isn’t that the students were not taught, they were taught,” he said and that the teachers whose candidates excelled in the previous examinations in 2022, 2023 and 2024 were the same teachers that taught them.
Deliberate
Mr Musah said no public servant would go out there and deliberately fail students and “once we are providing public service, there would be ups and downs.
“When we are up there, we find out what the success indicators are and look at them.
When we come down, we look at what really led to this one.”
“My prayer is that politicians would leave education alone.
When there are matters like this, let them stop taking centre stage and begin to complain and lambast one another.”
“We need to understand the economic and developmental implications when we compromise on the educational system.
It is not something we need to take lightly, and whatever we can do to protect the integrity of our exams, we must do it.
We should avoid the blame game and stop using it as a political football”.
The WASSCE-SC data, among other things, showed that in Mathematics, only 48.73 per cent of students scored A1-C6, while 26.77 per cent obtained F9. In Integrated Science, 57.74 per cent scored A1-C6, with 16.05 per cent recording F9.
The situation is no better in Social Studies.
Basic education
Touching on basic education, Mr Musah insisted that until there was a dedicated fund for basic education, the country would not be ready for quality education.
He said a dedicated fund was required to address the challenges faced in the sector, a key to building a strong foundation for the future generations of the country.
“I repeat, until we get a dedicated fund for basic education, we are not ready for quality education,” he said.
At the Doha Forum, President John Mahama linked the decline in candidates’ performance in the West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) to what he describes as “long-standing weaknesses in basic education”, and announced a government priority shift towards early literacy and numeracy.
At the Doha Forum 2025 yesterday, the President said the country must turn its attention to foundational learning to correct the gaps that had made progress at the secondary level difficult.
“There has been a bit of neglect at the basic level, and so we are going to return to foundational learning, getting the children to master the three Rs – reading, writing and arithmetic.
The GNAT had long advocated a dedicated fund for basic education in order to position it well to deliver quality education.
