Poor BECE results are the symptom, weak foundation is the disease we need to cure

Last month, WAEC released the 2026 Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) results, with over 50,000 learners failing in English and Mathematics. When Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) results disappoint, the question we ask is: why did JHS students perform so poorly? We scrutinize the examination, compare and analyse the results for trends, discuss discipline, phone use as a distraction, examination malpractice, teacher quality, etc. All these questions have some merit, but the more fundamental question is, what did these children know before they even entered JHS? That is where you realise that the BECE is not where Ghana's learning problem begins. It is where years of accumulated learning gaps become much harder to ignore. My argument is simple: if the foundation is weak, the final examination will expose it. Fix foundational learning, and you fix learning!

The warning signs appear years before BECE

BECE results are symptoms of a disease – several children are in school but are not learning. Consider the evidence from much earlier in the system. Ghana's 2024 National Standardised Test found that 50% of P4 learners were below the basic proficiency level in English and 45% were below basic proficiency in Mathematics. Only 21% reached high proficiency level in English, with just 18% in Mathematics. The problem is visible even earlier. Ghana's 2022 Primary 2 NST found that only 38% of learners could read at grade level, compared to 62% who could not (Source: https://nacca.gov.gh/report/). In the last Early Grade Reading/Mathematics Assessment (EGRA EGMA) assessment, as much as 98% of learners could not read at grade level.

It’s not a Junior High School or BECE Problem

That should fundamentally change how we talk about BECE. A child who cannot read fluently and comprehend a text is not only struggling in English. They are also struggling to access all other subjects. So, when that child arrives at JHS and encounters increasingly demanding content, we should not be surprised when performance deteriorates. The system has been carrying the deficit forward. We tend to think about education in stages: KG, primary, JHS, SHS. Children, however, experience education as a cumulative process. A child who misses early reading skills does not receive a clean slate at Primary 4. A child who enters upper primary without adequate comprehension does not magically acquire it because the curriculum has moved on. When I taught JHS pupils in Kalpohin some years ago, some learners in JHS 3 struggle to read simple sentences after 6-8 years of schooling, many other teachers have had this experience, even up to the senior high school level. The Junior High School curriculum has no room for such learners; rather, the demands increase. The texts become harder, instructions longer and concepts more abstract. Teachers have less time to go back to the basics because they are expected to cover the curriculum for the grades they teach. By JHS, the problem can look like an English problem, a science problem or a mathematics problem. But most of it began years earlier.

This is why the distinction between schooling and learning matters. Ghana has made progress in getting children into school, although a good number are still out of school. The challenge is increasingly whether the years children spend in school translate into the knowledge and skills they need.

The 2023 Ghana Partnership Compact is unusually clear on this point. It identifies foundational learning as the country's overarching priority reform area and defines it as the literacy, numeracy and socio-emotional skills that provide the building blocks for subsequent learning. (Source: https://www.globalpartnership.org/node/document/download?file=document%2Ffile%2F2023-ghana-partnership-compact.pdf).

That is the right direction. The question however is, if foundational learning is the priority, what targets are we measuring ourselves by? Are we organising the rest of the basic education system around achieving it? What is our strategy for advancing foundational learning? How are we tracking efforts? Where is dedicated funding coming from? I don’t see BECE results getting any better if we don’t prioritize foundational learning. And we can’t prioritise foundational learning without a clear and coherent systems-led strategy in action (not just on paper).

We keep asking schools to do more
Ghana's Standards-Based Curriculum was not designed merely to help children pass examinations. It aimed to build competencies, creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving, values, STEM skills and the capabilities needed for further education, work and citizenship. The curriculum is ambitious; the issue is not that Ghana expects too much from education, but whether the system can deliver all these priorities well and at the same time. Schools are now expected to strengthen foundational literacy and numeracy while also developing subject knowledge. With the newest curriculum reform bringing us to 13 subjects at the basic school level, including the introduction of Chinese, French and Arabic from primary 1, etc.

Each of these expectations has merit. But curricula are not implemented on paper. They are delivered by teachers in real classrooms with limited instructional time, finite resources and learners with diverse needs. In that context, success depends on prioritisation. Global evidence suggests that systems that achieve strong learning outcomes typically ensure mastery of a few foundational skills first, then build progressively on them (Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel's Report: https://thedocs.worldbank.org/en/doc/231d98251cf326922518be0cbe306fdc-0200022023/related/GEEAP-Report-Smart-Buys-2023-final.pdf ). The goal should not be to cover everything at once, but to ensure that children firmly master the knowledge and skills that make further learning possible.

NaCCA itself has recognised this challenge. The National Curriculum Framework (check page 16) cautioned that “the curriculum is still loaded - there is curriculum overload/overlap caused by an imbalance of depth and breadth. There are too many subjects in the school curriculum – 7 in KG and 8 in lower primary” making it difficult to focus on the most important learning outcomes. Findings from the new Ghana National Education Campaign Coalition’s (GNECC) Breadth of Learning (BOLO) research under NEST point to the same concern, revealing significant gaps between the intended curriculum and the implemented curriculum (See https://www.brookings.edu/articles/learning-what-matters-in-ghana/ ). In practice, ambitious expectations often collide with the realities of teaching and learning, and some content are not taught when the curriculum is loaded.

A curriculum can be educationally ambitious and still be operationally unrealistic, and it is particularly worrying that we are adding on to an already overloaded curriculum with the recent reforms. We should therefore be cautious about responding to weak learning outcomes by continually adding new competencies, themes or initiatives. Not every educational challenge requires an additional curriculum demand. Sometimes meaningful reform comes from making deliberate choices about what to prioritise, what to sequence and what to leave for later.

We must simplify to succeed

Recently, an educationist I respect bemoaned that the kindergarten curriculum has no content on technology, noting how important this has become in the age of AI. Given the chance, many would expand the curriculum without a second thought. When I had the privilege of joining the technical working group on a recent curriculum review project, one of the fiercest debates was whether children need more content or deeper mastery of less. The intention is genuine, our children should learn everything important to enable them to ‘compete globally.’

The argument is not about what is important and what is not. The question is not what else schools should teach, but what children must master first. The answer is neither to abandon critical thinking nor return to rote learning. The answer is sequencing. Children first need a strong base. Then those foundations can be deliberately used to develop more complex competencies. Critical thinking does not exist in a vacuum. Children need knowledge to think critically about. Problem-solving requires something to solve and the conceptual tools to solve it. Creativity is more powerful when learners have knowledge, vocabulary, confidence and the ability to communicate their ideas. Digital skills do not compensate for an inability to understand what is being read on a screen.

This is where "simplify to succeed" becomes important. Simplification does not mean lowering standards. It means identifying the standards that are non-negotiable, ensuring that they are mastered, and then building progressively from them.

Ghana already has some evidence that simplifying gets better results

There is also reason for optimism. Ghana does not need to import new solutions. The country's experience with Differentiated Learning Plus and Complementary Basic Education provides an important lesson. DL+ uses assessment to identify where children are performing, groups learners according to their learning levels, provides targeted instruction and tracks progress. An independent evaluation of 320 primary schools over three years. More recent evidence from UNICEF reports substantial gains among participating schools. From the 2024 NST, the proportion of Primary 4 learners in DL+ school that were below basic proficiency in reading fell from about half to roughly one-third after one year. In mathematics, the proportion below proficiency fell from 67% to 33%. (Sources: https://www.unicef.org/documents/improving-foundational-learning-scale-evidence-ghanas-differentiated-learning-plus, https://www.unicef.org/ghana/blog/inspiring-learning-through-differentiated-learning-plus-dl).

While this example does not suggest that one programme will solve Ghana's foundational learning challenges, they demonstrate that narrowing the instructional focus and giving teachers practical tools to respond to learners at their level lead to meaningful progress. Program components like targeted instruction, structured pedagogy, regular assessment and targeted periodic teacher training with ongoing coaching all show promising results, although implementation quality matters enormously.

What should change? The National Education Forum report given to President Mahama in June 2025 has 212 recommendations. With limited time and resources, it is welcoming that the ministry is decidedly choosing to invest in foundational learning. The next steps are to decide that we need to do things differently if we expect different results. While I have shared thoughts on what we could do, but to summarise what I will prioritise in 3 points:

1. Ghana should establish a small set of non-negotiable foundational learning outcomes by specific grades and years, as part of our foundational learning strategy. Without specific targets that we are rallying the education system to achieve, and the leadership and accountability needed to achieve those targets, we may be prioritizing only in speeches. Aiming at a global benchmark is vague, we need to set our own goals and work towards achieving them.
2. Assessment must become more useful for instruction. A national assessment should not merely tell us that children are behind. It should help the system understand where they are behind and give teachers practical ways to respond. This calls for repositioning the National Standardised Test (NST) as a diagnosis that tells the teacher where the problems are and what needs to be done. In my conversations with teachers and district officials, I struggle to find examples of how the NST changes classroom practice.
3. Teacher professional development should concentrate more heavily on the pedagogy of foundational literacy and numeracy, including assessment, explicit instruction, differentiation and remediation. We should normalise targeted remediation and build this into our curriculum and the timetable. A Primary 5 learner reading at a Primary 2 level needs support at their learning level, not simply more Primary 5 content delivered more slowly.

Foundational learning must remain a system-wide responsibility. By the time a child reaches JHS, it is too late to pretend that foundational learning is someone else's problem. JHS teachers should not have to choose between teaching the JHS curriculum and repairing years of unresolved learning gaps. Our worry should not be why a 15-year-old failed to answer a BECE question. It is why, ten years earlier, we allowed that child to progress without mastering the skills needed to understand the question.

The author, Senyo Tettegah, is an educationist and Host of the Let’s Talk Education Africa Podcast as well as Country Manager for the Luminos Fund.