Parents should stop late admission of wards into school – Africa Education Watch

Research Fellow with Africa Education Watch, Divine Kpe, has encouraged parents to strive for early education of their children.

Speaking in an interview on Campus Exclusive, he stated that late enrollment of pupils into primary school is one of the factors that lead to school dropout.

According to him, when a child is early enrolled in school, brain formation can effectively develop and be suitable to grab academic work.

When a child stays home for long, there is a high tendency for the ward to drop out of school since that particular ward may be older than his peers, he said.

“Many of our children start schooling so late, and if a student doesn’t start school early, there is a likelihood that he or she will become a drop-out, because the student will be above his or her classmates, and a lot of issues will come up."

“That is why we are encouraging early childhood education so that when the ward starts school early, the brain formation can effectively develop and able to grab academic work, but if a student stays home late and what he or she is able to study at a particular age he doesn’t,” he said.

He disclosed that two percent of pupils are being repeated and as a fact cause J.H.S school dropout and further advised educational stakeholders to reduce the rate at which pupils transiting into Junior High Schools (JHS) are been repeated in schools.

“…about 2 percent of the students are being repeated, so if they want to transit to JHS 1, 2 percent would have been repeated already and before they go to class six a lot have been repeated along the way and it keeps increasing the number.

“So if a child is continuously repeated, he becomes to grow above that class age also influencing school drop-outs at the JHS level,” he noted.

The Africa Education Watch, in a report published on November 1, 2020, indicated that in September 2009, about 720,000 learners were enrolled in Kindergarten 1 to begin an eleven-year basic education journey in Ghana.

September 2020 marked the completion of the 11-year Basic Education journey where successful learners sat for the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE).

However, the number that sat for the BECE was only 531,000, with an estimated 42,000 sitting for other international examinations, leaving about 147,000 learners who were unable to sit for the Basic Education Certificate Examination in September 2020.