A Revenue and Financing Fellow with the African Education Watch has said the ongoing strike by the pre-tertiary teacher unions will block the success of this year’s Basic Education Certificate Examinations (BECE).

Geoffrey Ocansey says prospective candidates would have lesser time to prepare for the examination if the industrial action continues.

In a Prime Morning interview on Tuesday, July 12, he warned there could be another big blow to the pre-tertiary education sector as the country fights to recover the academic calendar, which was messed up by the Covid-19 pandemic.

“There will be inadequate preparation for [BECE] candidates. As we speak right now, there are candidates who are preparing for their BECE so this strike is going to affect these students.

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“Covid affected them [the current candidates] when they were in first year and it affected them again in second year because they were adjusting and then on their final year, this strike comes in to hit them again – this is unfortunate for this batch of BECE students,” Mr Ocansey highlighted.

Aside from that, he believes there will be loss of contact hours in addition to a disruption in the academic calendar again.

“You know what we went through with Covid when it affected the education calendar; so, there was a challenge and we were adjusting to cover up the time lost…from our observation and technical consideration, there will be contact time loss.

“The children will have to be in a classroom to receive tuition but around this time that there is a strike, contract time will be lost and that is very dire because we had already lost some time during Covid and we were trying to adjust. Another shakeup again like this would not be good for the education system,” he told Prime Morning host, Roselyn Felli.

This year’s BECE is scheduled to be held from Monday, October 17 to Friday, October 21.