General News of Tuesday, 2 April 2013
Source: citifmonline
Professor Ewurama Addy has suggested that too much ‘unnecessary’ emphasis placed on terminal examinations in Ghana’s educational system has rendered the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) irrelevant.
Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) is the entry exam for students seeking admission into the nation’s Junior High Schools
According to her, the concentration on the basic terminal examination “is a big bottleneck because if you are really giving people basic education and the structure or the system that you have doesn’t seem to give them basic enough education for them to live better, then it means that we really haven’t been successful.”
She said stakeholders have lost focus of truly providing basic education for every person.
This follows a call by a Former Minister of Education and the Member of Parliament for Assin South Constituency, Professor Dominic Kwaku Fobih, that the BECE must be scrapped because it is not really serving a useful purpose.
He suggested that the basic education must be terminated at the Senior High School level.
Speaking on the Citi Breakfast Show on Tuesday, she stated that there are a number of irregularities in the basic examination “and people come out and are supposed to have finished it and they can hardly write their names let alone hold a discussion” and are therefore no different from children who were unable to have access to education.
Prof. Addy therefore supported calls for Senior High School to be the terminal point for basic education in Ghana suggesting that after the SHS level, “those who want to continue, let them go and take an examination for entrance into the various tertiary educational system….let the various institutions offer their entrance examinations.”