The Ghana Education Service (GES) has distributed over 446,954 remedial materials to final year senior high schools (SHS), libraries and teachers in preparedness for this year’s West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) for school candidates.

The remedial materials contain packs of past questions from 2015 to 2020 and a guide on how to answer them as well as chief examiners reports to help guide the candidates ahead of the WASSCE.

In addition to the booklets, the GES presented 140 digital recordings of lessons in the core subjects — Core Mathematics, English Language, Integrated Science and Social Studies to the schools.

The Core Mathematics has 30 lessons, English Language has 40 and Social Studies 30.

Candidates

The Director General of the Ghana Education Service (GES), Prof. Kwasi Opoku-Amankwa, who made this known in an interview with the Daily Graphic, said the distribution of the items formed part of the government’s intervention to second cycle schools.

A total of 446,321 final-year SHS students are writing the 2021 WASSCE for school candidates across the country.

They are made up of 221,437 males and 224,884 females from 965 public and private second cycle institutions.

The 2021 WASSCE statistics made available to the Daily Graphic indicate that the public schools are 651 while the private ones are 314.

The examination, which began with the project work last Monday, will have the written papers taking off on September 1, 2021.

A total of 763 supervisors will be at the 763 centres to invigilate the examination.

Preparatory materials

Prof. Opoku-Amankwa said similar remedial materials were given to the candidates last year, saying that “they are preparatory materials to prepare the students towards the examinations”.

Those of last year were from 2013-2019.

The Director-General of the GES noted that each candidate had been given packs of the remedial materials while the digital lessons on external hard drives were for the schools.

“The teachers can download them onto their laptops and schools that have television sets can play them for the students to watch. The schools can also download them on their desktop computers in their laboratories to get the students to access.

“The feedback we are getting is that everything is good. We are also arranging to put it on YouTube and also put it on our Ghana Learning Television. Once it goes to YouTube, day students can also access in the comfort on their homes,” he said.

Prof. Opoku-Amankwa indicated that the preparations towards the examination were key because people did not go to school to fail but to excel and move on and so everything had to be done to guide the students to do well.

He said the final-year students were not supposed to take the remedial materials away, explaining that it had been communicated to the schools for reuse by subsequent candidates.

According to him, the materials got to the regional offices for collection by the schools from July 27 to 31, 2021.

Free SHS

Prof. Opoku-Amankwa said by the introduction of the free SHS, the government sought to relieve parents of their burden as far as funding was concerned and also give students some relief so that they would not be confronted with the problem of having to leave the classrooms for the non-payment of fees.

In doing this, he said the government did a number of things; the first of which was to provide two sets of uniforms, house cloth, Physical Education (PE) kits, core textbooks for each student, given out quantities of elective textbooks in addition to free feeding, among other things.

Again, Prof. Opoku-Amankwa said the government also paid some money for maintenance, examination, clubs and general administration of the schools.