A troubling consistency is school cert failure

Two consecutive years of marginal improvement in the performance of students in the May/June West African Senior School Certificate examination (WASSCE) was marred with the recently released result of the for 2014 exercise showing a steep drop.

About 70 percent of the candidates that sat for the examination in Nigerian schools failed to obtain the basic credit passes of at least five subjects, including English language and mathematics. In other words, only 30 percent of the total number of candidates that wrote the May/June 2014 WASSCE qualified for admission into tertiary institutions.
The numbers are staggering, and they indicate a sector in decline. Of the 1.6 million candidates whose results were processed, over 1.1 million failed, with just 529, 425 candidates attaining the minimum credit threshold. Officials of the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) characterised the outcome to be a pattern of ‘steady increase in failure rate’.
The 2012 and 2013 results of the May/June examination had 38 percent and 36 percent success rate respectively. In 2010, the success rate was 23 percent; in 2004 it was 18 percent of the over 1 million candidates.
It’s not just the education sector that is at risk; the entire country is. The perennial culprits to blame for this woeful performance are of course the government, parents and the students. Accordingly, parents and guardians get part of the blame because they are too busy to have time to adequately monitor their children and wards. Parents have a responsibility to guide and ensure that their children spend much of their time on reading and understanding syllabus-related topics. Students do not also help matters by their preference to rely on ‘miracle books’ and other ‘how-to’ materials. Rather than engage topics in the examination syllabus, students spend more time interacting with new media gadgets that have little to do with actual swotting.
Government planners take the flak also for converting Faculties of Education in Nigerian universities into dumping grounds for those who fail to make it to regular academic courses. Such candidates are mopped up from the list of rejected applicants at the end of admission exercises and sent to the faculties of education by university admission committees. Such is also the case with most of the candidates admitted in to the National Certificate of Education (NCE) programmes of Colleges of Education. Many candidates who fail to secure admission into their choice of courses in Nigerian universities fall back on Colleges of Education. Teachers produced through this process thereafter become liabilities to the system. Good teachers can be made out of those who willingly choose to specialize in education, but not the ones who find themselves by accident in teacher training programmes.
The education continues to suffer from the consequences of unqualified and untrained teachers. The success rate of candidates in any examination cannot be divorced from the quality of the available teachers. The failure rate in the last school certificate is therefore a reflection of the quality of teachers at the secondary level of the Nigerian education system. The recent reversal, for instance, of the sack of unqualified teachers from the state teaching service by Governor Adams Oshiomhole of Edo State is one example of political exigencies trumping sound judgement. Even the few qualified and trained teachers from among graduates of B. Ed degrees and NCE programmes prefer to join other services considered ‘lucrative’ instead of going to the classroom for which they were trained. A substantial number of those currently in the teaching profession believe in using it as a stepping stone to other jobs to earn ‘better pay’.
The unhelpful perception that a teacher’s reward is in heaven should be dispensed with forthwith. The government should spruce up its compensation policy for teachers, to make their remuneration competitive with the highest earning agency in the country, public and private. Training of teachers should be given the utmost priority.
Concrete efforts should be made especially by state governments to improve learning facilities in secondary schools. Libraries and laboratories should be well equipped with relevant materials. Motivation of teachers should be prioritized by government in order to begin to tackle such shameful outcomes as the last school certificate examinations.

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