Over 175,000 students who sat for the West Africa Senior Secondary Certificate examination and failed the English Language will have to compete next year with more than 400,000 free Senior High School first batch students for the limited space at the country’s tertiary institutions.

A backlog of about 200,000 students, created by merging two batches of SHS 4 and SHS 3 students who sat for the West Africa Senior High School Certificate Examination in 2013, still exists.

The West African Examination Council results of 2019 WASSCE candidates revealed that 100,781 candidates obtained between D7 to E8 in the English Language while 74,038 had F9.

These candidates who failed a core subject—English Language will have to retake and apply for a university next year. A year that will also witness a boom in admission as the first batch of free SHS students expected to enter university.

The reality is that this single batch of free SHS beneficiaries is more in number than the entire student population of the 138 tertiary institutions in the country at the moment.

The 138 tertiary institutions, including colleges of education and nursing training, have an entire student population of 320,746 covering all batches, and they can admit about 100,000 students yearly as a result of limited infrastructure.

Expected to heighten the race for university admissions next year is the over 400,000 Free SHS beneficiaries together with the over 150,000 candidates who may not get admitted as a result of the failed English Language subject, this year.

This development puts pressure on Senior High School graduates outside the Free SHS program to do all they can to secure admission into the country’s public and private tertiary institutions this year, or risk competing with over 400,000 Free SHS beneficiaries for limited spaces in tertiary institutions.

Infrastructure neglected

About 99 percent of the oil cash used to support the country’s education budget for 2018 was used to pay for goods and services – mainly for the payment of school fees in respect of government’s Free SHS program, while about 1 percent spent on physical infrastructure.

An analysis of the Public Interest and Accountability Committee’s Annual Report on Management and Use of Petroleum Revenues for the Period 2018 reveals, the total Annual Budget Funding Amount (ABFA) allocation of GH¢ 419,871,012 was to the education sector, over GH¢ 414.6million was spent on fees for Free SHS beneficiaries and GH¢ 5.2million on expanding existing infrastructure and building new ones.

The amount spent on physical infrastructure is worrisome. Given there has been an increased enrolment in SHS students as a result of the government’s Free SHS policy.