IMANI proposes law for politicians wards to attend Ghanaian SHSs

The founder of IMANI Center for Policy & Education, Franklin Cudjoe has urged the central government to introduce a law that will force wards and close relatives of politicians to attend any of the Senior High Schools in the country.

His proposal comes after some government officials despite the West African Examinations Council withholding results of 40% of students who sat for the International examination described this year’s WASSCE results as good.

“I understand results of 160,000 candidates’ of the Ghana-only version of the 2023 West African Senior School Certificate Examination have been withheld by the West Africa Examination Council for various types of malpractices.

That’s nearly 40% of the total number of candidates that sat the exam. Yet a press statement accompanying the announcement of the results claims the 2023 WASSCE for School results are the best since 2020

Examinations aside, the problems of the Ghanaian High School student keeps distracting from the quality outcomes Ghana needs

The best way for things to change is to force by law all wards and close relatives of politicians to go to these high schools,” the founding President and CEO of IMANI said in a social media post sighted by Thisterm.com.

In a related story, the Executive Secretary of the Institute for Education Studies (IFEST), Dr Peter Partey Anti has called on individuals attributing the good performance in the 2023 WASSCE to show scientific findings for their analysis.

In an interview with TV3, Peter Anti said the attribution of the 2023 West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) performance to the Free SHS policy without providing a scientific basis is worrying and unprofessional.

Admitting the that 2023 West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) for School results looks good, the IFEST official also said there is a need to focus on the performance of the individual schools and the students.

The Executive Secretary of the Institute for Education Studies said assessing the performance of the individual Senior High Schools (SHSs) and students who sat for the examination will determine whether they actually performed or not.

“My only problem is that normally academics like myself do not do these kinds of analyses in a vacuum. We need not just look at the average figures that have been presented, you need to delve deeper into the data and find out how individual schools are doing and how individual students are also performing, that is the only point that you will note that the results are really what we think they are.

We also have to look at the individual’s performance in relation to their various elective subjects. You will agree with me that you need a pass in three core subjects to be able to pursue tertiary education but at the same time, you need a pass in three elective subjects.

“So if you don’t get the pass in your electives and you are passing your core subjects it still means you will not be able to access tertiary education as you so wished to, so these are the issues we need to understand. The figures look good but let us look at the performance of individual schools and then the performance of students within these schools.

“That is why when people want to ascribe the performance of the students in WASSCE to the Free SHS, some of us, get a little worried because no evaluator, I mean the professional ones, would want to single out a policy and say it is because of this intervention that is why we are having this outcome when that person has not scientifically proven that that is really what is happening,” he told TV3.