SEE results mask great inequalities

The government has a great opportunity to address the shortcomings of school education.

The Ministry of Education, Science and Technology released the results of the Secondary Education Examination (SEE) on Monday, just a month after the students sat the exams. The ministry deserves credit for conducting on-site evaluations, which eliminated the three-month delay in disseminating results. This suggests that the government, formed with a mandate to bring about a sea change in governance, has responded to the demands of the country’s youth, showing that with political will, administrative reform is achievable. Yet the good SEE results should not mask the need for an overhaul of the country’s school education system. With around a 4 percentage point increment in the pass rate from last year, 65.98 percent of students passed the exam this year, while 145,507 students fell under the ‘non-graded category’. As in previous years, the results expose the structural inequalities that plague our teaching-learning system.