Dr. Peter Anti, Executive Director of the Institute of Education Studies (IFEST), has cautioned policymakers and the public against relying solely on national averages to interpret the sharp decline in the 2025 WASSCE results.

Speaking on JoyNews’ AM Show, Dr. Anti stressed that the national statistics released by the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) fail to reveal the underlying issues affecting individual schools.
“If we want to understand what is happening, you don’t use the national averages,” he said. “You have to go to the schools and look at their performances over the years, or for that particular year that the exam produced the average. Then you would know which schools performed extremely well or poorly during that period."

Dr. Anti argued that school-level analysis is crucial for identifying institutions with significant drops in performance and understanding the factors behind these declines.
“These drivers are what we need to go into the data and look for,” he added. “We need to identify the individual schools that didn’t perform well this year and then ask ourselves what really happened. These are policy issues," he explained.

The caution comes in the wake of WAEC’s provisional release of the 2025 WASSCE results, which revealed worrying declines in several core subjects. A total of 461,736 candidates from 1,021 schools sat the exams, a slight increase of 0.24% from 2024, while 5,821 candidates (1.26%) were absent.

Core Mathematics emerged as the most alarming concern, with over half of the candidates, 220,008 students failing, marking the worst performance in seven years.

Education analysts say the trend raises questions about teaching quality, supervision, resources, and student preparedness. Dr. Anti warned that broad national statistics risk obscuring the disparities between schools, and urged evidence-based, school-level approaches to guide policy reforms.