On Thursday 9th October 2014 media reports suggested that, Two hundred and fifty (250) students of the Labone Senior High School (SHS), Accra-Ghana have been sacked for their abysmal performance in the end-of-year examination of July, this year. The students, who had an average of four failures in eight subjects, were sent packing when the first term of the 2014/2015 academic year began. Out of the number sacked, 155 of them were second-year students who were supposed to go to Form 3, while 95 were first-year students entering their second year (http://tinyurl.com/kq7xvx6). The Ghana Education Service (GES) has since endorsed this decision which could potentially embolden other head teachers to continue the practice with alacrity.

However, this GES policy, which the Labone SHS appears to operationalize, fails to recognize that preparing senior high school students to qualify for tertiary education is just one of the several aims of secondary education. The contemporary thinking of secondary education gravitates around the notion that all children and young people should develop the knowledge, skills and attributes they will need if they are to flourish in life, learning and work, now and in the future. Certainly, such objectives cannot be achieved via a high-stake examination driven curriculum like the present one in Ghana.

The dismissal of the Labone SHS students is despicable to say the least.  First of all, we need to recognize the different ability levels of each learner so that low performing ones get assisted and not punished. Secondly, when a student fails an exam we need to understand all the underlying factors occasioning the failure before we make any clear attributions.  It is widely acknowledge within education psychology literature that school factors, home factors, individual factors, curriculum, pedagogy, teacher characteristics, amongst others, impede or facilitate academic achievements. Yet, Labone SHS appears to attribute the students’ failure narrowly to home factor alone as reported in the media. Interestingly, when teachers write their lesson notes, their objective reads:  "By the end of the lesson the student will be able to ....” which suggest that each student must demonstrate competence in the particular behaviour of interest. Why should we hold the students alone accountable for their failure then? Thirdly, it is very difficult to imagine that, a mere  end-of-term examination should determine students’ future as in this case.  An internal examination which typically lack moderation, quality assurance, validity or reliability? Fourthly, the head teacher is alleged to have said that the situation might have been different if the parents whose children were affected had honoured an invitation by the school. "We invited 300 parents to a meeting as a way of finding measures to deal with the situation but, surprisingly, only 36 of them turned up". Obviously, she unjustifiably punished [sacked] the students for the ‘sins’ of their parents. In other words, if all the parents had honoured the school’s invitation, the 250 students, probably, wouldn’t have been sacked. 

Questions need to be asked of which school do we want these students to go or where do we expect them to go from here? Do we want them to create more social problems? The psychosocial impact of this single act on the students’ academic life is well documented. For example, an affected student reportedly asked, with tears in his eye: “the term has just begun and so if I pack home now, what will people say and what will I tell them?” The solution is to obtain systematic and verifiable evidence on why the students have "failed" with the view of understanding the interplay of all the potential factors.

We don’t want more students to be dismissed on these vexatious grounds.

Please sign this petition for a total recall of these students and full independent inquiry into why they failed the exams as well as a review of this obnoxious policy.