Mahama blames WASSCE collapse on neglected basic education

Nii Ayitey Brown 14:32 - 04 December 2025

President John Dramani Mahama

President John Dramani Mahama has linked the sharp drop in performance in the 2025 West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) to long-standing neglect of Ghana’s basic education system.

Speaking at the launch of the STEMBox initiative for primary schools, he emphasized that weak foundational learning, compounded by delays in the release of capitation grants and challenges in ensuring quality teaching, lies at the heart of the crisis.

It emphasises the issue of foundational learning. One of the major things that has taken place in the last several years is the neglect of basic education … inability to send the capitation grant, ensuring that we have quality teachers at the foundational level or the basic level,

Mahama said. The president warned that students who lack essential skills are simply pushed through the education system without the competence required to succeed at higher levels.

Because it is that level that prepares the child for secondary and tertiary education, and once you don’t get that level right, you will just send the child through a conveyor belt like a factory, and when he comes out at the end it will be picked out by quality control and said that this one did not do well. So our focus must be on foundational learning,

he stressed. Mahama described the WASSCE decline as a matter of serious concern for the government, parents, and the wider public. He revealed that he has directed the Minister of Education to conduct a detailed analysis of the examiners’ report to identify the reasons behind the dramatic drop in results, particularly since the same teachers and conditions were in place as in previous years.

It has become an issue of great concern to the government, parents, and the public at large. I was speaking with the minister, and I have asked them to do an analysis of the examiner’s report and try and decipher what could have gone so disastrously wrong. It is mind-boggling that with the same teachers, the same factors in play, just from one batch to another, one batch does so disastrously, and also we need to get to the bottom of it,

Mahama said.The 2025 WASSCE results reveal steep declines in key subjects. Pass rates fell dramatically in Core Mathematics, Integrated Science, and Social Studies, while English also saw a noticeable drop. Analysts and education experts have linked the decline to systemic issues, including insufficient teacher support, lack of teaching materials, and delays in capitation grants, factors that undermine the quality of foundational learning in primary and junior high schools.

Education stakeholders, including the Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT), have echoed the president’s concerns.

The Center for Education Policy and Management (CEPM) further pointed to administrative lapses under the Free SHS programme as a contributing factor to the collapse in performance. President Mahama’s call for a thorough review of the examiners’ report underscores the government’s recognition that surface-level solutions will not address the root causes of declining educational outcomes.

Experts agree that improving foundational learning will require timely funding, better-trained teachers, reduced class sizes, improved teaching materials, and robust monitoring systems. The 2025 WASSCE decline serves as a wake-up call for Ghana’s education system.

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