An aide to former Vice President Dr Mahamudu Bawumia is calling for a more informed national discussion on the causes of the 2025 West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) performance.

According to Dennis Miracles Aboagye, stakeholders need to move away from blaming the Free Senior High School (Free SHS) policy for the poor results, stating that the ongoing public debate has become overly political and is distracting from the real issues that contributed to the decline in student performance.

Speaking on Accra-based Channel One TV on Wednesday, December 3, he argued that Free SHS does not influence the quality of teaching or classroom instruction and therefore cannot be held responsible for the poor outcomes.

• Read also: 2025 WASSCE results: Nearly 1 out of 4 candidates failed Core Mathematics and Social Studies

He explained that the fundamentals of teaching and learning remain unchanged under the policy, noting that teachers continue to apply the same instructional approaches and operate within the same academic structures.

Mr Aboagye urged education authorities to instead focus on the technical reasons behind the weak performance, especially in Core Mathematics and Social Studies, and develop targeted interventions to address them.

“Anybody who says that Free SHS is the reason for these failures is not being intelligent. It is an ill-informed comment and does not hold water. We need to stop politicising this issue,” he said.

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He added that a proper diagnosis of the root causes is necessary to prevent similar outcomes in future examinations.

“Let us identify, technically, what caused the poor performance in these two subjects and fix it,” he stressed.

Background

The West African Examinations Council (WAEC) has confirmed a national education concern with the release of the provisional WASSCE 2025 results, revealing a worrying surge in the outright failure rate (Grade F9) across all four core subjects compared to the 2024 results.

An analysis of the official data released shows that the percentage of candidates who failed Core Mathematics outright (Grade F9) has nearly quadrupled, rising from 6.10% in 2024 to an alarming 26.77% in 2025.

Similarly, the failure rate for Social Studies has almost tripled in a single year, from 9.55% in 2024 to 27.50% in 2025.