Ernest Ato Bentil, an educational technology consultant and WAEC examiner, has highlighted the persistent challenges facing Ghana’s education system, pointing to weak foundations at the primary level as a key factor in poor performance at the Junior High School (JHS) stage.
Speaking on Connect FM’s Omanbapa Morning Show, Mr Bentil recounted a striking example from his experience as an examiner: “As an examiner, sometimes you will open the answer booklet and realise the candidate did not write anything.
“There was a time I opened the booklet of a female candidate and saw a note; she had written, ‘I’m a beautiful girl’ and had added her phone number to it.
“Such a student is expecting the examiner to call her for some form of negotiation, but the laws of WAEC do not allow that. It means that the student, for example, did not learn anything for the exam, but she has been in the classroom since infancy.”
He stressed that the problem begins much earlier in the educational journey. “The challenge we are having in our education system currently is the foundation of the students.
“We must strengthen the base of our education system. Most of our students suffer in the Junior High School (JHS) levels because their foundation in the upper primary level was weak. Most of the topics in the JHS curriculum begin in the upper primary.
“In the JHS level, they only top them up, so if a child is unable to secure a good foundation in the primary level, which takes about six years, they cannot catch up in the Junior High School level, which is about only three years,” he explained.
