The Institute for Education Studies (IES) has revealed that access to senior high schools is greatly curtailed by the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE), which registers significant failures.

“BECE has become an albatross on our neck in which students are deliberately failed because of the system; I have made this argument for a very long time because of how the assessment process is done. So to expand access to SHS, you will have to look at scrapping the BECE,” Executive Director of IES, Dr Prince Armah, said on Class FM’s Executive Breakfast Show on Monday, February 13.

Explaining his position to the host of the programme, Moro Awudu, he was of the view that the BECE ensured only a few above-average students qualified to pursue secondary education, a selection process he believed was flawed.

He maintained that people who move on to senior high school are very often “coming from affluent or good background and a large proportion of individuals we want to focus to uplift them are coming from very deprived areas and that is what we need to do, in terms of addressing the disparity of how to get more people from these areas to go to SHSs and also scrapping the BECE”.

He was reacting to the recent announcement by President Nana Akufo-Addo that the Free SHS policy of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) would commence in September.

For him, the priority of government should be ensuring access to quality education for deprived people at the basic level.