Sierra Leone's Data Hub Provides Comprehensive Educational Data
One of the great difficulties we have encountered in writing about
education in West Africa is in obtaining the raw data on national
examination performance. The West African Examinations Council, WAEC,
the regional examinations body, is notoriously tight-lipped in
releasing information. The headaquarters in Ghana and the national WAEC
offices (all English-speaking
West African countries have a national office that conducts
examinations other than the school-leavers' WASSCE) all appear to
regard release of information, almost any information with perhaps the
exception of examination timetables, as a last resort.
The websites of these organizations could credibly be described as a
disgrace. One gets the impression there is a great fear of computers
lurking somewhere behind the webpages, and outright terror that somehow
hackers could get into the organizations' most sensitive data (past
exam results, future exam questions) through this strange, new internet
world! The sites are updated perhaps once or twice a year, most notably
when WAEC's annual conference comes round in March/April. If you are
looking for serious statistical information on examination performance,
don't go there! National ministries of education tend to be just as
reticent.
Which makes the new education data website from the Directorate
of Science, Technology and Innovation, State House, Sierra Leone
all the more refreshing. It is brim full with data for the years 2016 through 2018, down to the level of the
individual school, presented, with the aid of an interactive map, in a fashion that makes even UNESCO's vast
UIS educational database look clumsy. Of course this is data only for
Sierra Leone, but how wonderful it would be if the other WAEC nations
would follow suit and give us a comprehensive picture of primary and
secondary education in West Africa.
We have long known that Sierra Leone's WASSCE results were disastrous,
and this new data amply confirms this. The pass rate for the WASSCE
nationally in 2018 is given as 17.3% with the successful candidates
heavily biased towards the Freetown area. In the provinces, pass rates
were much lower. Just as interesting though would be the figures from
the other WAEC countries. We provided some of this information for the years 2010 through 2012 in Dysfunctional Education.
There we found that in the years under review Sierra Leone's pass rate
fluctuated between 2.5% and 4%, whilst Nigeria was achieving pass rates
of as much as 64%. Why are Nigeria and Ghana pulling ahead of the rest?
How have
they been able to achieve it? And when does it occur? Does the
difference in performance show up at the end of primary school? Or at
the end of the JSS stage? Or only at WASSCE. Answering these questions
would provide a starting point for addressing the problem.
The WASSCE is currently the only yardstick we have to measure ourselves
in relation to our West African neighbours. The WASSCE is an
international examination, supervised by WAEC Hq, with candidates
sitting the same papers, marked to the same standard. The other
examinations are national, supervised by the individual national
offices, who are responsible for setting the questions and marking the
papers. The NPSE, the primary school-leaving examination in Sierra
Leone, is subject to T score adjustment, whereby all raw examination
marks are adjusted to meet a certain target, essentially to achieve a
certain pass rate. Thus, the pass rate from year to year tells you
little about the real performance of the students achieving this pass
rate. Granted, there may be valid educational reasons for wholesale
adjustment of examination scores, and granted such wholesale
adjustments may even be taking place to some extent at the WASSCE, but
the suspicion is that these adjustments in Sierra Leone are merely used
as one method (there are others) to mask a drop in the standard of
students year after year. In the absence of some absolute standard by
which to evaluate our students, the WASSCE serves as the next best
thing, by allowing us to compare their performance against their
Nigerian, Ghanaian, Gambian and Liberian counterparts. The new
education data website provides one good chunk of data with which to do
this comparison.