A Former Minister of Education in the erstwhile Kuffour-led NPP Administration and the Member of Parliament for Assin South Constituency Prof Dominic Kwaku Fobih is calling for a complete phasing out of Basic Education Certificate Exams (BECE) because it has no value.
According to the professor, “BECE is an exam just for identifying the strengths of pupils and placing them in their various programmes like science, arts, business and visual arts at the SHS level, but pupils do not have to qualify to go to SHS just like they do not have to pass an exam from primary to JHS.”
He told Adom News there is need to entrench a policy to make BECE a tool to identify the strengths of the pupils and place them accordingly, instead of as a means to judge who qualifies for SHS.
Prof. Fobih likened the BECE to the defunct Middle School Leaving Certificate Examination, which was replaced with the JHS system because it became dysfunctional and irrelevant just like the BECE, as a tool of qualification, has become.
“The current JHS certificate is like the former Middle School certificate, it has outlived its usefulness and has no function in the present day society and in the modern day educational system,” he said. “JHS certificate is not worth anything and it also darkens the future of the holders by giving them the impression that they hold certificate but it has no value.”
He said it has therefore become important to make SHS the mandatory terminal point, instead of using the BECE to terminate some pupils’ education, adding that from SHS, students could conveniently join the security service and other institutions, even if they are not able to continue to the tertiary level.
The Former Education Minister said today, nobody looks for JHS certificate to admit to tertiary institutions or recruit for security agencies.
He therefore called on the government and the stakeholders in the education sector to, as a matter of urgency, revise the objectives of the BECE.
