Blind Union demand WASSCE re-sit for students denied Braille

The Ghana Blind Union is asking the West African Examination Council, WAEC, to conduct fresh exams for visually impaired candidates, who could not write this year's integrated science paper in the ongoing West African Senior Secondary Certificate Examination, WASSCE.

WAEC failed to give three visually impaired students at the Adidome Senior High School in the Volta Region Braille to enable them write the exam. In an interview with TV3's Narkwor Kwabla, WAEC, apologized to the students but says the union's request cannot be granted right away.

The Ghana Education Service in a release on Tuesday stated that seven visually impaired senior high students were affected, but WAEC says on the record, only 3 students registered for integrated science.

It is the first time, visually impaired students have registered to write integrated science and mathematics at the examination, only to be disappointed.

"I will not be able to at this juncture point out exactly where the mistakes had come from. But I can say that there was a miscommunication somewhere along the line and that is why this occurred" says WAEC Public Relations Officer Agnes Teye-Cudjoe".

The exam body insists the affected candidates can only write these papers during exams for private candidates which normally comes off between November and December. WAEC says the affected students will not be charged extra fees for the exam.

"When we cancel papers because of examination leakage, we cancel and then go through the necessary process and then all the candidates rewrite. So I can't readily recall an instance where we've had to organize ourselves to come out with questions for a special group who have missed out on one paper or the other. So I will not be able to readily say that we did this last time round and so we can't do it this time".

But the Executive Director of the Ghana Blind Union, Dr. Peter Obeng says that arrangement is unacceptable.

"These children have learnt for this exam by spending sleepless nights only for you to tell them that you made a mistake so they should wait for December and write the paper. It's really unfair. We don't think that this should be the situation. What we were hoping that WAEC will say was that; because they made the mistake they could organize special exams for this children maybe by the end of this month or a close by date. But just pushing it to November because it's convenient for them we are still not satisfied and we think it is not the best situation" he noted.

The visually impaired union appealed to WAEC to treat their members just as they do for other candidates.