Another bit about education...

The school-leaving certificate which children can achieve at the end of their basic education in Ghana is called the BECE – Basic Education Certificate Examination.  Pupils “write” this examination (“write” is Ghanaian for “sit”) in the third term of their third year in Junior High School – JHS3.  If they entered the education system in the first Kindergarten class (KG1) at the age of 4 and have progressed yearly through each class, they will be 15.  BECE is a requirement for some jobs; and a prerequisite for access to the next phase of education, which takes place at the Senior High School.

To pass your BECE you have to achieve a score of 30 points or better in six examination subjects.  Four of these subjects are compulsory and are referred to as the “core” subjects – English Language, Mathematics, Social Studies and Integrated Science.  In addition, pupils study for “elective” subjects, and the best two scores in these subjects also count for BECE.  Pupils don’t have much, if any,  choice about which “elective” subjects they “write” – everybody in the JHS3 class studies the same subjects and in Bawku West District it’s pretty much the same subjects at every school, so really the only sense in which they are “elective” is that you could decide not to work very hard in one or two subjects and, as it were, put all your eggs in one basket. 

In Bawku West District the elective subjects taught are Religious and Moral Education, Basic Design and Technology (BDT - in some schools pupils can choose between BDT Home Economics and BDT Pre-Technical Skills, but in others only one of these is taught), Information and Communications Technology, and French (but only four JHSs do French).  In theory, pupils should also be studying a Ghanaian language, but this doesn’t happen in Bawku West because the local language, Kusaal, is not examined and no school teaches an alternative.  This strikes me as a pity and I think the lack of an opportunity to learn Kusaal formally probably puts the children here at a disadvantage compared to pupils in other Regions.  I don’t know whether it would be a practical possibility to study another Ghanaian language that was similar to Kusaal but even if it was there doesn’t seem to be any appetite to do this, and I’m also told that there are no teachers who could do it.

In each subject, the highest grade available is “1” and the lowest is “9” (though in one spreadsheet I saw a couple of “10s” for English Language).  Your BECE is the sum of your grades – so if you get a “1” in every subject, your score will be “6”.  To “pass” with a score of 30, you need an average of 5 in your six subjects.  A “better” score would be lower than 30 – eg 18 if your average grade was 3. The concept of a “pass” in individual subjects only exists rather vaguely, as far as I can tell.  People at the office do sometimes talk about a “pass”, and they usually mean a grade 5 or better.  However, when I have asked explicitly whether grade 6 is a “fail”, I’ve usually been told that “6” is a “weak pass”.  Grades 7, 8 and 9 do seem to be regarded pretty much universally as “fails”.  You could, though, “pass”’ your BECE with three grade 1s and three grade 9s; and whilst that is unlikely, I’ve seen plenty of “passes” which include grade 6s and 7s in some subjects alongside better grades in others.

A BECE score of 30 or better is supposed to guarantee you a place at Senior High School, though the process doesn’t seem to be automatic and you have to apply.  Moreover, you also have to buy the application form – this seems to be a widespread device in Ghana whereby educational institutions raise money, presumably to cover the cost of administering the admissions exercise.  A friend is at the point of applying to universities, and the forms cost in the region of 200 Ghana cedis – the “exchange value” of that is in the region of £70, but it’s much more in real value terms – it’s a month’s pay or more for people doing basic jobs - so the cost of applying to university verges on prohibitive.  I don’t know exactly how much it costs to apply to SHS, but it is certainly less.  

It seems quite common for people in Zebilla to apply to a Senior High School in one of the bigger cities further south – Tamale, Kumasi or Accra.  If you do this, you might then stay with some of your extended family there, or you might board at the school.  If you board, I think that also costs money.  I’m aware of one person from a rural location in the south who has come to Zebilla for her SHS, but my impression is that this isn’t particularly common, and possibly as a consequence the SHS places here don’t seem to be subject to huge competition and in the last couple of years places have been awarded to individuals with a BECE score as high as 40 (though it certainly isn’t the case that everyone with a score of 40 or better gets an SHS place in Zebilla).  Boarding seems to be free, or at least subsidized, in the three Northern Regions (see previous blog).  Specifically in Zebilla, at present there is an additional subsidy from a female education charity which seems to mean that SHS here is genuinely free for girls.

I have wondered whether there might be an element of corruption in these SHS admissions (not what you know but whom you know…).  Nobody has risen to that bait yet, but I have heard that more pupils are normally allocated to each SHS than they can actually accommodate, and that this is to avoid the situation where a head teacher finds him/herself with a vacancy which can be traded for money.  I have also heard the suggestion that some of the more prestigious Senior High Schools invite pupils with very good BECE scores to apply for entry – I don’t know whether this is an officially sanctioned system or whether it’s just a bit of opportunistic poaching.

Another rather unsatisfactory but eminently Ghanaian aspect of the SHS admissions process is that although the school year starts in September, the BECE results aren’t out until late September (and the certificate, which you need to append to your application form, doesn’t appear until November/December) - so it seems physically impossible to have applied and been accepted before the terms starts.  Our acquaintance from the rural south arrived in Zebilla in November but only actually started at Zebilla SHS in late January 2014  – so she has missed the whole of the first term and a couple of weeks of the second (but we’ve also been told that they don’t actually get taught anything in the first term).  Nevertheless, there were some pupils in the first SHS class right from the start, so maybe a process exists whereby admission is granted before the formal applications procedure has run its whole course.  Otherwise every pupil kicks his/her heels for a year.

Helping with the analysis of the 2013 BECE results was one of the first things I was asked to do.  There was a good deal of interest, because the District pass-rate in 2012 had been good reasonably - 42.1% - after a disappointing result of only 27.4% in 2011 (apparently the lowest in the Upper East Region).  People were keen for the improvement to have been sustained.  The actual outcome - 36.4% - was not as good as people were perhaps hoping for, but was not a disaster, and it wasn’t the worst in the region.

One aspect of the analysis of the results was that a number of schools in Bawku West District are being sponsored by the UK charity CAMFED, who wanted to know how their schools had fared, particularly the girls.  What follows is a summary of what I eventually pieced together about BECE results in general and girls’ results in particular.  I think it tells a number of stories and I think it allows us to glimpse something of what is actually happening here.  Of course, like all these things, it isn’t a simple story and I’m going to try not to draw simplistic conclusions from it.

My first question was whether 36.4% was a “good” result in the national context.  I haven’t found the answer to this – I haven’t managed to find out what the overall pass-rate was in Ghana, or how the other Districts in the Upper East Region fared, or what the results were like in the Upper West Region and the Northern Region, which would be the most comparable to Bawku West District in terms of being mainly rural, quite sparsely populated, and a long way from the more developed end of Ghana.  My guts tell me that 36.4% isn’t a particularly creditable performance – “could do better”.  Maybe “should do better”.

In my last post I commented that my colleagues at the GES office here aren’t good at analyzing data – and frankly I wasn’t impressed that they didn’t know how their results compared, and weren’t interested in finding out.  One of my ambitions is to leave them more curious about such things than I found them.

Was 36.4% a good result in terms of what Bawku West had achieved before?  It took a bit of serendipity but eventually I pieced together the following table of overall BECE pass-rates since 2004.

Bawku West District BECE Pass-rates – Overall
	2004	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009	2010	2011	2012	2013
Total	40.4%	42.4%	51.2%	70.7%	66.9%	34.4%	28.8%	24.3%	42.1%	36.4%

 

Not, I felt, a particularly revealing set of results.  Maybe you could say that the trend was improving from 2004 to 2007/8, then declining again until 2011, and possibly now getting better again.  If you compared 2013 with the position ten years previously, ignoring the intervening years, you would either say that it was pretty much the same (reasonable maybe if you take 2012 and 2013 together); or that it had deteriorated a bit.  The 36.4% in 2013 was below the average achieved over the decade and only just above half of the best result achieved.  You would be hard-pressed to say that anything had improved over the ten years as a whole.

I looked at the grades achieved in individual subjects, and found another disappointing story.  There was a low proportion of passes in the higher grades – 1, 2 and 3 – and in fact almost 70% of the results were in grades 5, 6 and 7 – so the lowest “pass”, the “weak pass”, and the highest “fail” grade.  In 2013, out of almost 7,500 individual exams, there were only 31 grade 1s, and only 440 results at grade 1, 2 or 3.  That is, less than 0.5% and 6% respectively.  There were small differences in the percentages of higher grades in different subjects – for example fewer high grades in Maths – but essentially it was the same picture across the board. 

No student had achieved the best BECE pass score of 6 in the three years for which I could find data in that degree of detail – the best were one score of 8 and two of 9.  There was no trend of the percentage of higher grades increasing or decreasing – in fact, most of the numbers seemed to go up and then down again without any discernible pattern, and the most striking feature was the lack of any obvious trends of any sort.

In terms of individual subjects, I found that some of the electives had rather disappointing success rates.  French was the worst by far – only 5% of candidates passed in 2013.  Basic Design and Technology and ICT were better though not sparkling at between 30% and 35% passes.  Maths and English were a little better – between 40% and 45%.  The best subjects were, in that order, Integrated Science, Social Studies, and Religious and Moral Education – for these the pass rate (defined as grade 5 of better) was above 50%.   I struggled to see why science should be better than Maths, and Social Studies and RME better than English – when I asked about these, one suggestion was that the subjects with the higher pass-rates included more multiple-choice questions.  I haven’t checked to see whether and to what extent that is the case, and even if it is true I would have expected that a decent marking system would have leveled out that difference and I could see no reason why Bawku West District pupils should benefit disproportionately from this fact (if indeed they do).

When I split the data between boys and girls I found something more definitive.

Bawku West District BECE Pass-rates – Boys and Girls
	2004	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009	2010	2011	2012	2013
Boys	45.7%	52.9%	59.5%	76.5%	74.3%	44.2%	36.6%	31.2%	47.7%	42.7%
Girls	29.6%	24.5%	39.2%	62.2%	54.8%	22.9%	17.8%	16.5%	35.0%	27.8%
Total	40.4%	42.4%	51.2%	70.7%	66.9%	34.4%	28.8%	24.3%	42.1%	36.4%

 

The girls’ results are considerably worse than the boys’, every single year.  In 2010 and 2011 the girls’ results really are dreadful, and they are poor every year except 2007 and 2008.  The boys’ results aren’t exactly stellar, but they look quite a bit better than the overall results and the series from 2004 to 2008 must have looked like a good news story at the time.

I found more detail of the results in 2011, 2012 and 2013, and further examination of these data revealed that girls performed worse than boys in every dimension I looked at. 

For a start, fewer girls than boys even “wrote” the exam.  In 2004 only 33% of the candidates were girls.  In 2013 it was 42%.

Their overall pass-rate was worse. 

Their overall BECE scores were worse.

The percentage who achieved a “pass” in all four core subjects was lower, and more girls than boys failed to pass any of the core subjects.

Their individual grades were worse. This was the case every year in every individual subject, with the sole exception of French in 2013, when 7% of girls passed compared to 5% of boys.

By this stage I was feeling rather depressed about education in Bawku West District, at least to the extent that its value is reflected in BECE results, and definitely from the point of view of gender equality and the achievement of the girls.  Was there any good news at all?

Well, I did identify two trends which I think are positive, and I’ve deliberately kept them till now because they have prompted my next investigations, which are incomplete at this point.

The first is that the number of pupils who “write” their BECE has more than doubled over the decade.  In 2004 there were 490 candidates and 198 of them passed.  In 2013 there were 1106 candidates and 403 passes.

The second bit of good news is that this trend is more pronounced for the girls.  In 2004, only 162 girls in the whole District “wrote” their BECE and only 48 passed.  In 2013 these numbers were 464 and 129, and both are the result of a rising trend, which has seen the percentage of female BECE candidates in the District rise from 33.1% to 42.0%.

Colleagues with more experience than me of working in development have said repeatedly that things happen more slowly than you’d initially hoped, and that the steps forward are small and tentative.  My sincere hope is that these two facts in an otherwise rather dismal picture are those small, tentative steps and will eventually lead to results which more genuinely reflect the potential of the people in Zebilla and its surrounding villages.

In the next installment I’ll put the 1106 BECE candidates into context, and I’ll tell you what I have discovered so far about why girls perform less well than boys in this significant examination.

Just for a bit of fun, I’ve typed below some questions from the BECE mock exams last year.  Each subject has a 45 minute paper during which candidates answer 40 multiple-choice questions – this selection come from those papers.  

ENGLISH LANGUAGE

1          Insert the word which most suitably completes the sentence.

*   I have ……….. an improvement in our food.

A. notified    B. watched   C. noted        D. noticed

*   The players were trotting onto the field when we …………….. at the stadium.

A. arrive        B. have arrived                   C. were arriving                  D. arrived

*   The workers are protesting ………… the management’s new plans.

A. at               B. against      C. between   D. connecting

2          Choose the word nearest in meaning to the underlined word

*   James was so wicked that all his friends abhorred him.

A. dismissed B. beat                       C. hated        D. ignored

*   Most men normally do not wear costly jewelry.

A. good                     B. expensive C. shiny                     D. new

3          Choose the word most nearly opposite in meaning to the underlined word

*   The classroom is surprisingly chaotic.

A. busy                      B. dirty                      C. hectic        D. orderly

*   Do not despise poor people because you are rich.

A. cheat         B. avoid                     C. admire      D. annoy

4          Choose the phrase which best explains the underlined word or phrase

*   Adzo’s bad manners make her the black sheep of the family.  This means that Adzo is a….

A. bully                      B. destroyer C. disgrace    D. liar

*   Issah was asked to toe the line or quit the team.  This means Issah was asked to ….

A. apologise B. resign        C. change      D. obey

5          Literature

*   Which of the following best describes the term literature?

A. Imaginative writing      B. work of art          C. Creative and imaginative writing      D. Artistic drawing

*   Literature is a bit different from any ordinary piece of writing in English especially through……

A. its use of vocabulary    B. artistic use of language            C. rhyming   D. advanced writing

*   One of the following is not a poem.

A. ballad        B. legend       C. epigram    D. lyric

*   A simple poem which intends to make fun of people’s ideas and events is….

A. an epigram          B. an epic      C. an elegy    D. a lyric

* A literary device that exaggerates for the purpose of creating humour is…..

A. an irony   B. euphemism         C. metaphor            D. hyperbole

*   A literary device that puts two opposite words side by side for an effect is called….

A. an oxymoron                  B. egnedoche          C. onomatopoeia   D. paradox

SOCIAL STUDIES

*   Which of the following is not an ethnic group?

A. Asante                  B. Akan                      C. Ga-adangbe                    D. Mole-Dagbani

*   The scale 1cm = 7km in representative ratio is….

A. 1:700,000           B. 1:7000      C. 1cm 7km  D. 1cm 14km

*   Which of these is a satellite?

A. The Sun    B. The Moon            C. The Earth D. The Meteorite

*   General pardon for offences against the state is done by the…..

A. Chief Justice                    B. Appeals Court Judge                 C. Vice President    D. President

*   Law and order can be enforced at home through all the following except…..

A. scolding    B. advice       C. capital punishment       D. withdrawal of privileges

*   ………….. is added to salt to prevent goiter

A. Mercury   B. Iodine       C. Hydrogen                        D. Proton

*   Which people celebrate the Akwantukese festival?

A. Kwamawu           B. Tachiman C. New Juabeng                  D. Akim Oda

*   Who was the chief of Elmina in 1471 when the first Europeans arrived there?

A. Nana Kojo Mbrah         B. Nana Owusu Ansah      C. Nana Nkansah Bruce    D. Nana Kwamena Ansah

*   Which of the following is a physical change in an adolescent boy?

A. Ovulation            B. Enlargement of breast C. Broadened hips  D. Broken voice

*  The business concern set up by an individual or state to provide essential goods and services to satisfy human needs is a/an…

A. entrepreneur                 B. company  C. insurance D. enterprise

MATHEMATICS

*   Expand and simplify 2(a + 3b) – 5a(2 + 3b)

A. 6b – 12a – 15ab            B. 6b – 8a – 15ab   C. 6b + 8a – 15ab   D. 6b – 8a + 15ab

*   The image of x in the mapping x  5x – 3 is 12.  Find x.

A. 5     B. 4     C. 3     D. 2

*   Find the slope of the line which passes through the points A (5, -2) and B (6, 8).

A. 1/10                      B. 10/1                      C. -1/10                     D. 7/14

*   Arrange 0.75, 0.67 and 0.6 in descending order.

A. 0.6, 0.67, 0.75   B. 0.6, 0.75, 0.67   C. 0.67, 0.6, 0.75   D. 0.75, 0.67, 0.6

*  Write 0.06998 correct to two significant figures.

A. 0.006        B. 0.007        C. 0.070        D. 0.059

*   John is 7 years older than his sister.  The sum of their ages is 63.  Find his sister’s age.

A. 7                 B. 18              C. 28              D. 35

*   The area of a circle is 6.16m².  Find the radius.

A. 7m             B. 14m                       C. 21m                       D.28m

*   Write 2454 in standard form.

A. 2.454 x 10^-2         B. 2.454 x 10^-3         C. 2.454 x 10²          D. 2.454 x 10³

*   By how much is 5/8 greater than 3/8?

A. 3/8                        B. 2/8             C. 1/8             D. 5/6

*   A point P (5,7) is rotated through an angle of 90^o anti-clockwise about the origin 0.  Find the image P1 of the rotation.

A. (-7, 5)       B. (-7, -5)      C. (7, -5)        D. (-5, 7)

*   Find the truth set of -3(x + 5)  30.

A. {x : x  -15}         B. {x : x  -15}         C. {x : x  -15}         D.  {x : x  -15}

INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGY

*   Which of these characters is not allowed in folder names?

A.   @             B.   )                C.   /                D.   $

*   When information is exchanged on the internet, the message is sent out and broken up into several pieces of the same size called………..

A. servers     B. destination          C. software  D. packets

*   The second longest key on the keyboard layout is the……………..

A. spacebar key                  B. shift key   C. tab key     D. backspace key

*   Which of these is a shortcut command for printing a document in Microsoft Word?

A. Ctrl + C     B. Shift + P    C. Ctrl + P      D. Alt + P

* The first point of contact for locating any information on the web is through a/an………..

A. website    B. web browser                  C. internet    D. explorer

*   The raw material from which information is obtained is called ………..

A. output      B. data                       C. processing           D. storage

*   Which of these is a peripheral to the computer?

A. Keyboard B. Mouse      C. Floppy disk          D. Camera

*   The power switch of a computer is mostly located at the …………………. Panel.

A. back                      B. side                        C. front                      D. middle

*   The …………….. bar displays the name of the document and the application being used.

A. standard  B. menu        C. title                        D. task

*   The top row of icons in Microsoft Paint are……………..

A. Selection tools    B. Airbrush tools     C. Pencil tools          D. Line tools