School procures furniture for BECE centre
The Crown and Glory School at New Gbawe in the Ga South District has spent GH¢58,800 to procure 280 pieces of furniture for its new examination centre.
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According to the proprietor of the school, Mr Yaw Amankwah, the school had to provide the furniture prescribed by the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) for use by students writing this year’s Basic Education Certificate Examinations (BECE) which started across the country on Monday.
Official accreditation
The WAEC granted the school official accreditation to be used as a centre for the BECE after it had provided the furniture and satisfied the requirements.
In an exclusive interview on Monday on how the school gained its new status as an examination centre, Mr Amankwah said, “Our numbers have grown bigger year after year and we felt that considering the size of our population, commuting was a difficulty and the examination officer approached me and wondered if we could make this place a centre, considering that we had infrastructure”.
He said he needed a year to budget for the furniture and was able to acquire them for this year’s examination.
He mentioned that the Crown and Glory School had offered 18 of its classrooms for the examinations, with twin classrooms taking about 40 of the pupils.
Schools writing the BECE at the Crown and Glory are Great Provider, L & A Memorial, Melstar, Aggrey Memorial, Eunipad and Gonse basic schools.
Benefits of school as centre
Mr Amankwah said previously, Crown and Glory candidates wrote their BECE at Danem Royal Basic School at Buleimi, near New Gbawe.
Apart from the challenge of transporting candidates from the school to the examination centre year after year, he said, getting the children to arrive on time was another problem.
Pupils writing the BECE
Mr Amankwah told the Daily Graphic that for this year’s BECE, the Crown and Glory School presented 95 pupils out of the total number of 250 pupils writing the examinations at the centre.
He said the school had always chalked up 100 per cent passes, since its candidates wrote the BECE for the first time in 2009 and added that, “Hardly does a child from the school not get his or her first choice school”.
Mr Amankwah disclosed that two males out of the first batch of 16 pupils who wrote the BECE in 2009 were now in the medical school.
Explaining that the raw score of the pupils always mattered in the BECE, he said, sometimes parents took it for granted that because their children had obtained nine grade ones, they would automatically gain admission to the school of their choice.
He,however, indicated that it did not work that way and that the raw score comprised the aggregate of the core subjects - English, Maths, Science and Social Studies, and any of the candidate’s best two subjects.
Prioritise basic education
He urged the government to prioritise basic education, since according to him, it was the foundation of education for children, stressing that, “Basic education is the bedrock of education. If you don’t get the basics right, everything else is wrong”.
Disparities
Bemoaning the disparities in the levels of education in rural and urban arrears, he said, pupils in Class Six or Form One in most rural schools found it difficult to spell simple words, while asking them for the meanings of words was like asking them to perform an impossible task, even though they wrote the same examination with those in the urban areas.
“So you see, about 70 per cent of them will drop off and this is a huge chunk. And if we had got them to read early, and provided the basic infrastructure at that level, then perhaps, they could also have joined that small group to swell it then we proceed from there,” he said.
