Teachers are unpaid, unwilling to teach -WASSCE pupils complain

Society

Last year’s results to the West Africa Senior Secondary Exams (WASSCE) once again shocked the public, with just 4.5% of the candidates gaining admission requirement to go to universities. Now, in 2021, extremely anxious pupils gear up for their turn at one of the most feared examinations in Sierra Leone: the WASSCE.

Blame for the poor results at the WASSCE in 2020 is not squarely placed. At the St. Edwards, and the Prince of Wales Secondary Schools in Kingtom, Freetown, students say teachers are unpaid or underpaid, and that they are more interested in teaching private lessons, which causes them to come late to school.

Sharraf Dalome, SS-3 Science pupil at the Prince of Wales, spoke with the mannerism of an adult when he characterized his educational universe: “We have inefficient school management system. We have unqualified teachers in the school, and the teachers are not being paid. They have these private lessons [in private schools] which is paying them one million, and [our] school is not even paying them that kind of money. Automatically, the teachers will not be coming to [our] school to teach, they would decide to teach in their private schools.

There are a lot of teachers that we know, who teach in the private sector, because they pay them. And when they are in our own school, they are not teaching. They have several private lessons they are teaching.” Others claimed the teachers come late for classes.

Emmanuel Alexander Simbo, SS-3 pupil of St. Edwards Secondary School, explained that the massive failure of the past WASSCE exams is also because teachers do not come on time to classes, causing students to lose precious education time.

“If you take a look at the classes now, since the reopening of school, [there are] topics that we are supposed to be covering. But the teachers are not coming, they are not punctual to teach us.”

SS-3 pupil, Desmond Conteh of the Prince of Wales, agreed. “We have some teachers in our school, they are not punctual. Whenever they come, they tell us to attend their private classes, because they are not being paid the way they are expecting.”

Secondly, he noted “We have inadequate teaching materials. We are calling on the indulgence of the Minister of Education for him to supply us maybe 50% of the books so we can perform better in public exams.”

But Osman Kargbo, pupil of SS-3 Arts of the St. Edwards Secondary School held a different view from his colleagues. He pointed out that, while the mathematics exams is being conducted by the school, the classes are mostly empty. So, when pupils fail to attend classes, they should not blame the school when they fail to pass their exams.

“Students are not serious with their academic work. They are dodging classes,” he said, and equally blamed the parents who are not monitoring their children’s academic performance and school attendance.

Teacher, Josephine Cole, SS-3 at Prince of Wales, said that not all students love the school and blamed their poor performance in classroom for the poor results in the examination.

“Pupils are not paying attention. They are not reading [books], they depend on their phones. They just want ready-made, especially those taking the private WASSCE, they don’t love book learning. They are not interested, they just want to spy.”

In his 2021 New Year address, President Bio said that his government ensured that public education financing stayed at 22% of the budget, and also set up a multi-donor Trust Fund of about $72m dollars. As a result, the President said, 2.6 million pupils are direct beneficiaries of this investment with increased access to education. But while access to education improved, quality of education is dragging behind. Two years into President Bio’s commitment to Free Quality Education, only 4.5% of WASSCE candidates in Sierra Leone gained admission requirement to universities in 2020, according to Ministry of Basic and Senior Secondary Education data. Umarr Koroma, SS-3 teacher at the St. Edwards Secondary School explained that many factors need to be considered when trying to understand the low WASSCE performance, and that some of these factors are unavoidable. In order to address the problems, he said, “a lot of parties have to play their own part- the community, the government, the pupils themselves and we the teachers.”

“Over the years we’ve realized that when the pupils know that they are candidates for the exam, they stop coming to school.” Also, noting that most of those organizing syndicate extra classes “are just WASSCE graduates” and they often “lie to these pupils, telling them that they will give them the exams questions and they pay millions in those syndicates, and abandon their classes.”

OG/11/1/2021 Ophaniel Gooding By [email protected]

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