On Thursday, September 3, the Computerised School Selection and Placement System (CSSPS) delivered a number that should have stopped the nation in its tracks. Of the roughly 620,000 candidates who sat the 2026 Basic Education Certificate Examination, about 55,000 will not be placed into any Senior High School not because their overall aggregate was poor, but because they failed either English Language or Mathematics, the two non-negotiable subjects.
CSSPS Coordinator Sherif Sulemana put it plainly on Joy FM’s Super Morning Show: “You are disqualified from placement if you have failed either English or Mathematics.” Only 17% of all candidates (about 107,000 children) scored an aggregate between 6 and 18. Fifty-five thousand children. That is roughly the population of a small municipality, and every single one of them is a teenager whose next four years, and quite possibly next forty, just changed because of a subject we have taught for decades and still cannot get right.
I have spent years in online classrooms and behind cameras trying to close this exact gap, and I need to say something that will not be popular in every corner: this is not a WAEC problem. It is not even, primarily, a “these children didn’t study” problem. It is a systems problem, a household problem, and if we are honest, a national attitude problem toward English as a skill rather than a subject to be passed and forgotten.
Diagnosing the Failure
Ask any teacher standing in front of a JHS classroom in Accra, Kumasi, Tamale, or a village along the Volta, and they will tell you the same story in different accents. Children are taught grammar rules they cannot apply. They memorise comprehension answers instead of learning to reason through a passage. They write essays in a language they rarely speak aloud, because school is often the only place they encounter English at all. Add to this apathy for reading for leisure at home, overcrowded classrooms, and an exam culture obsessed with “chew and pour” rather than comprehension and expression, and you get exactly what CSSPS just announced: children who can copy from the board, children who know every single word, note, rhythm and dance routine of latest songs but cannot construct a coherent argument, spoken or written, when it counts most.
This is not a new observation. It is, however, a newly urgent one, because the consequences of failing English no longer end at the classroom door.
Why This Is No Longer a Personal Inconvenience – It Is a Verdict on the Future
There is a comforting lie we tell ourselves as a nation: that English is “just a school subject,” something you pass, forget, and move on from into the “real work” of your career. I want to dismantle that lie, gently but firmly, because the world these 55,000 children are inheriting does not agree with us.
We live in a global village now; not as a slogan, but as an economic fact. A tailor in Kumasi can sell to a customer in Toronto by tomorrow morning. A content creator in Tema can build an audience across five continents before lunch. A university graduate in Ho can apply for a remote job with a company headquartered in Singapore. None of that happens without a shared language of commerce, and today, whether we are comfortable with it or not, that language is English. Research backs this up with striking consistency. EF Education First’s English Proficiency Index – the world’s largest ranking of English skills by country has found that in almost every country and territory it studied, a rise in English proficiency tracked with a rise in per capita income, gross national income, and productivity. On an individual level, the pattern is even sharper: recruiters and HR managers globally report that job seekers with exceptional English relative to their country’s average command salaries 30 to 50 percent higher than their peers. This is not coincidence. English proficiency correlates strongly with a country’s capacity to export services and services, unlike gold or cocoa, are Ghana’s real growth frontier: you cannot ship an accountant, a customer service agent, a software developer, or a consultant the way you ship a container. You export their voice, their writing, their ability to be understood, clearly and persuasively, by a client who has never seen their face.
So when we say a child “failed English,” what we are really saying (whether we like the sound of it or not) is that a door into that global economy has, for now, been shut on them.
Confidence Is Not a Soft Skill. It Is the Skill.
Through my online public speaking course and “Command the Room” in-person intensive, I have met brilliant, capable Ghanaians who shrink in interviews, freeze in boardrooms, and lose negotiations not because their ideas were weak, but because their command of English made them doubt themselves before anyone else got the chance to doubt them. This is not vanity. It is measurable. Studies on executive presence consistently identify communication as one of its central pillars. One widely cited framework attributes roughly a quarter of what senior leaders say determines the next promotion to executive presence itself, built substantially on how clearly and confidently a person communicates. Surveys of working professionals go further: the overwhelming majority say communication ability has been the single most important factor in their career advancement, more important even than technical skill and yet it is the area where they most often feel underprepared. Confidence, gravitas, and the ability to persuade a room are not born fully formed. They are built, brick by brick, on a foundation of language fluency. A child who cannot yet construct a clear sentence in English is not just losing marks in an exam. She is losing the raw material from which confidence, later, will have to be built — often the hard way, in adulthood, under pressure, when the stakes are a job offer or a client contract instead of a school certificate.
To My Brothers and Sisters Who Call This Colonial Slavery
I understand and I respect the argument that insisting on English is a colonial hangover, a subtle continuation of subjugation dressed up as “standard.” I will not dismiss it, because there is real history and real pain behind it. But I ask that we separate two different questions: should we cherish, teach, and protect our indigenous languages? Absolutely, without compromise. Twi, Ga, Ewe, Dagbani, Hausa, Fante, these are not decorations on our identity; they are our identity, and no child should grow up unable to speak the language of their grandmother.
But the second question is different: which language do we use to speak to each other and to the world, when we cannot agree on one African language among ourselves? Ghana alone has dozens of languages, and we have never not once, in nearly seventy years of independence been able to agree on a single indigenous official language, because the moment we try, ethnicity and old wounds surface. That is not a failure of our languages. It is an honest reflection of our diversity. English, whatever its origins, has become the practical bridge not because it is superior, but because history handed it to us as the language spoken across the widest number of borders, boardrooms, and browsers on earth. Choosing to master it strategically is not betrayal of our roots; it is the same instinct that leads a Ghanaian entrepreneur to learn French for ECOWAS trade, or Mandarin for a manufacturing partnership. Multilingualism is power. Monolingual pride, in a hyperconnected world, is a cage however comfortable it feels.
Talent Should Never Be a Casualty
Now let me hold myself to the same honesty I am asking of everyone else, because there is a hard truth sitting underneath these 55,000 names that I will not pretend away: some of those children are not “weak.” Some of them are the boy who can strip and rebuild an engine before he can write a five-line paragraph about it. The girl with a genuine gift for tailoring, catering, carpentry, art, or sport, whose hands understand things her pen has not yet caught up to. Under the current system, a child can be gifted, disciplined, and full of potential and still be shut out of any Senior High School placement because one exam, in one subject, on one day, said no. That is not a filter for competence. In too many cases, it is a filter for one kind of competence, applied as if it were the only kind that counts.
This does not weaken my argument about English, it sharpens it. English fluency remains essential to the world these children are entering; I am not walking that back. What I am rejecting is the idea that a child who has not yet mastered it should therefore be discarded from the education system entirely, at fourteen or fifteen years old, with no bridge and no second door.
The fix is not to lower the importance of English. It is to stop treating “failed English” as a full stop when it should be a comma. Any child who fails English or Maths but shows real strength academically elsewhere, or in a technical, vocational, or creative skill deserves a pathway, not a dead end.
What We Must Do Now?
CSSPS and the Ministry of Education should introduce a structured bridging pathway for candidates who fail English or Maths but qualify or show aptitude elsewhere conditional placement into SHS or TVET institutions paired with mandatory, intensive remedial English in the first year, rather than outright exclusion from second-cycle education.
TVET and technical institutes should be resourced and promoted as a genuine first choice, not a fallback for “those who failed,” with embedded literacy support so a student can strengthen a trade and their English at the same time, rather than one being sacrificed for the other.
Parents must stop treating English as “school’s job.” . Read with your children. Correct gently, consistently. A child whosparingly speaks or hears English only between 8am and 2pm will always be behind a child who reads, speaks and writes frequently.
Teachers must move beyond grammar-on-the-board and prioritise speaking and comprehension, not just writing mechanics. Oral English cannot be an afterthought squeezed in before exams; it should be daily practice, from Grade 4 onward.
The Ghana Education Service must audit why comprehension and continuous writing scores are consistently the weakest link, invest in teacher training specifically in communicative English methodology (not just literature), and consider structured, funded reading programmes in every basic school because a country cannot out-workbook its way to fluency; it must out-read and out-speak its way there.
Content creators, coaches, and institutions must keep making English learning feel accessible, current, and unashamedly Ghanaian not something borrowed from a BBC broadcast, but something spoken with our own rhythm, confidence, and pride.
Fifty-five thousand children just learned, in the harshest way possible, that English is not decoration. It is infrastructure; the roads and bridges on which their ambitions must travel. Our job, all of us, is to make sure the next 55,000 never have to learn that lesson this late, or this hard.
The author Blessing Bliss Coab Frimpong (Teacher Blessing) is a broadcast journalist, communication coach, brand influencer and founder of Teacher BlessingOutreach and “Command the Room” coaching programme.
Email: info@theteacherblessing.online
Sources referenced: CSSPS/Joy FM (September 3, 2026); Graphic Online; EF Education First English Proficiency Index; World Economic Forum (“The link between English and economics”); SUU/MBA Executive Presence Survey; Center for Talent Innovation executive presence research.
