By: Nyima Sillah
Louis Moses Mendy, Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Basic and Secondary Education said this year’s results are better than the 2021 results.
“As a sector, we would want to ensure that nobody fails. We were very concerned about the bottom level. This means we want to reduce the failure rate to zero. That’s the intention of the Ministry and that’s what we work towards but we have seen that progress achieved over the last five years.
“Even though we have also seen slide drops in terms of those students who are scoring 5,6-7 credits this year, our target is just not to concentrate on those privileged few. We want the general interest of the students meaning we want more students transiting to higher education meaning tertiary institutions, universities you name it,” PS said on Gambia Radio and Television Service.
He said they are also interested in having a bigger group that could be employed and trained but that cannot happen if more people fail at the bottom and that’s what they are reducing.
Meanwhile, PS said, “What we have seen this year is impressive knowing where the students that sat these exams come from.”
“By the way of analysis in 2017, we registered 21.7% of the total students that sat the WASSCE exams completely having zero meaning all the subjects they did, they didn’t score anything. We have now been able to reduce it to 6% so I don’t know where the total failure is coming from if you look at that against last year too, last year we had 9.4% of the students that registered for WASSCE with a total failure and this year we have 6% so there is still a difference of at least 3.4% so it’s not accurate to say that,” he noted.
However, the PS disclosed that these students were those that were in G10 when the Covid-19 hit and they had 265 contact hours lost. This means almost two terms of the entire Academy of these students were interrupted by Covid-19.
“When schools resumed what helped them was remedial classes and the remedial classes cannot be as effective as the normal classes. What would have happened in the normal operational environment would be the normal classes will exist and the remedial will supplement that. So, here we have remedial as the main source of helping the students. So, it is important that people put that in perspective,” PS said.
