A former headteacher, Samuel Salamat, is concerned that Ghana is losing ground to Nigeria as far as the performance in the West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) is concerned.

Mr. Salamat, who is a member of the National Education Assessment Unit, has been tracking Ghana’s performance in the WASSCE over the last three years and comparing it to fellow English-speaking West African Countries.

He feels that Ghana has not been able to keep pace with countries like Nigeria and even The Gambia.

For example, 75 percent of Nigerian students passed core maths 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 said on The Point of View.

Mr. Salamat stressed that this “is an issue that we need to look at from a holistic perspective.”

He 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.”

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 explained 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.”