By Joseph Fitzgerald Kamara, Esq.
Education and learning are in my DNA: I am the child of a mother who taught for 45 years. This year’s WASSCE results are a stark reminder of how badly our educational system is failing.
Free Quality Education and WASSCE results, call it a spectacularly awkward marriage, a promise on one side, a receipt on the other. On one side, the gleaming promise of “Free Quality School Education,” launched in 2018 to remove financial barriers and transform learning. On the other, the 2026 WASSCE results, arriving like a party crasher with a megaphone. Emmerson’s hit song “Tutu Party” easily comes to mind.
Astonishingly, this year’s WASSCE results show only 9.7% of candidates managed a credit in English, while 63.33% failed outright. If that is quality, I’d hate to see the alternative.
English, the gateway to university and the supposed marker of a “quality” education, is in freefall. Reportedly, nearly 42,000 registered candidates did not even show up for the English exam. Can you blame them? When the system throws students and teachers into an English only classroom where neither is fluent, mass failure isn’t a surprise; it is a policy outcome.
Meanwhile, the infrastructure of “quality” is held together with duct tape and prayers. 38% percent of the teaching workforce lacks formal qualifications. Classrooms are overcrowded, textbooks are scarce, and learning outcomes remain stubbornly low despite the access gains.
And lest I forget the malpractice ledger reveals 13,237 results were withheld in 2025, another report putting the latest (2026) figure at 47,454. The system is not just failing to teach; it is failing to convince anyone that the game is fair.
The WASSCE results are the receipt for the government’s purchase order of “quality education.” And the receipt says the goods were never delivered.
