The Center for Education Policy and Management (CEPM) has expressed serious concern over Ghana’s provisional 2025 West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) results, warning that the country is facing what it described as an “educational emergency” driven by management failures within the Free Senior High School (Free SHS) programme.
In its omnibus analysis released in Accra on December 1, CEPM said a year-on-year comparison of 2024 and 2025 results showed a sharp fall in the number of candidates attaining grades A1 to C6—the minimum benchmark for admission to tertiary institutions—across the four core subjects. According to the think tank, nearly a quarter of a million university-entry passes have been lost across core mathematics, integrated science, social studies, and English language.
“The drastic drop of nearly 100,000 A1-C6 passes in Core Mathematics alone represents an educational emergency,” the statement said, adding that the Core Mathematics pass rate at A1-C6 had fallen to 48.73 percent, leaving more than half of candidates below the tertiary-entry threshold.
CEPM stressed that access was not the problem. “The current crisis is not a failure of access, but a fundamental failure of execution and management,” it said, while reaffirming support for the underlying objectives of Free SHS to expand access and improve outcomes.
The think tank attributed the slump to chronic administrative lapses, including the suspension of academic intervention grants that funded remedial classes, the withdrawal of targeted teacher training programs—particularly examiner-led sessions for core subjects—and persistent shortages of textbooks, science consumables, and ICT tools.
Financial constraints also featured prominently in the analysis. CEPM said delays in releasing feeding grants had triggered food rationing in some schools, while arrears to suppliers undermined procurement of teaching and learning materials. Infrastructure bottlenecks, including uncompleted projects and overcrowded classrooms, were cited as further constraints on learning time and instructional quality.
CEPM also pointed to an integrity challenge in the 2025 diet, citing cancellations of subject results for thousands of candidates, the annulment of entire results for 653 mobile-phone cases, and prosecutions linked to malpractice.
As a remedy, the think tank called for a legally protected Quality Enhancement Fund, faster disbursement of operational monies, and a public timetable to complete stalled infrastructure, alongside renewed teacher development and strict enforcement of examination rules.
