Former Minister of Schooling, Dr. Yaw Osei Adutum, has blamed the sharp drop within the 2025 West African Senior College Certificates Examination (WASSCE) outcomes on the present authorities’s determination to droop funds to lecturers for extra tuition beneath the earlier authorities’s Free Senior Excessive College (Free SHS) programme.
On the difficulty, Mr Adutum stated the Akufo-Addo authorities had used the intervention subsidy paid to lecturers to offer further tuition to college students, particularly those that wanted help earlier than exams. He argued that the cancellation of those funds by the Mahama administration immediately undermined college students’ preparation and contributed to poor outcomes.
“We used to pay lecturers to do additional classes to organize college students. This authorities has stopped paying lecturers on that entrance. To me, I used to be not shocked by the outcomes we bought,” he stated.
He additionally refuted claims that the decline in grades was linked to a crackdown on examination dishonest. Mr Adutum questioned that logic and cited knowledge from the canceled examination papers.
“What shocked me was once I heard on the information that college students’ grades didn’t enhance as a result of they stopped dishonest. Then I went to test the variety of papers that had been canceled and located that 6,000 topics had been canceled this yr in comparison with 4,000 in 2024, so that may’t be true,” he stated.
The 2025 WASSCE outcomes revealed a pointy decline in scholar efficiency throughout core topics, with the go fee in core arithmetic dropping from 66.86 p.c beneath the earlier authorities to 48.73 p.c.
Among the many interventions that Adutum claims have been discontinued had been an annual intervention grant of GH₵165 million for extra tuition charges, in addition to a efficiency contract system for administrators and principals, examiner-led instructor coaching and the iBox digital studying undertaking.
The Ghana Schooling Service (GES) has flatly rejected the previous minister’s claims. In an announcement signed by communications director Daniel Fenney, GES stated it was not true that lecturers’ allowances had been canceled, declaring that the Auditor Normal and the Accountant Normal had publicly defined the explanations for the delayed cost in November. The division described the 2025 outcomes as a dependable reflection of scholars’ true educational efficiency and stated strict anti-fraud measures had improved the integrity of the examination course of.
The GES referred to as on the general public to disregard Mr Adutum’s feedback, describing it as an try and divert consideration from his personal shortcomings in managing the vetting course of earlier than leaving workplace.
Ghana is scheduled to revert to the worldwide WASSCE format in Could and June 2026, after shifting to a Ghana-specific model beneath the earlier authorities. GES urges college students to organize nicely for the transition.
