Bad BECE results blamed on poor supervision

August 29, 2009

AN education expert, Prof. Jophus Anamuah-Mensah, has identified the lack of effective supervision and monitoring as key factors that contribute to the poor performance of Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) candidates.
He also said the lack of motivation for teachers and inadequate number of qualified teachers to fill empty classrooms were other factors.He was reacting to a Daily Graphic publication in the August 27, 2009 edition of the paper that said just a little over 50 per cent of the 2009 BECE candidates qualified for placement into senior high and technical schools.
He stressed the need for the Ghana Education Service (GES) to step up its supervision and monitoring activities, and cited the impressive performance of some candidates of private schools which had been as a result of effective supervision and monitoring.
Prof. Anamuah-Mensah said in as much as parents were partly to be blamed for the poor performance of candidates at the BECE, the biggest blame should go to the Ministry of Education and the GES.
“You have circuit supervisors complaining that they cannot undertake monitoring and supervision because they do not have transport facilities, such as motorbikes or other vehicles,” he said, and underscored the need for such personalities to be provided with the needed resources to work effectively.
He said the government should invest more in education through the provision of teaching-learning materials, infrastructure and the motivation of teachers, among other things.
Prof. Anamuah-Mensah described the perennial failure of BECE candidates as a “crisis situation” that needed urgent attention, saying that “adequate measures should be put in place to address the problem, since failure to do that would not augur well for the country”.
“We need to wake up because when children roam the streets without employable skills they become armed robbers and engage in cyberfraud (sakawa),” he warned.
Meanwhile, the Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT) says teachers, students, parents and the government have a greater role to play in improving the performance of candidates.
GNAT said it was incumbent upon the stakeholders mentioned to play their individual roles, since the failure of anyone of them to do so would not help in solving the problem.
“All of them must perform for us to achieve the desired results,” the President of GNAT, Mr Joseph Adjei, told the Daily Graphic.
He said while the government had to provide the needed infrastructure, teaching and learning materials, teachers needed to be motivated to offer their best, while parents needed to ensure that they monitored the academic activities of their children, who also had to take their studies seriously.