The writer
We must simplify to succeed
Recently, an educationist I respect bemoaned that the kindergarten curriculum has no content on technology, noting how important this has become in the age of AI. Given the chance, many would expand the curriculum without a second thought. When I had the privilege of joining the technical working group on a recent curriculum review project, one of the fiercest debates was whether children need more content or deeper mastery of less. The intention is genuine, our children should learn everything important to enable them to ‘compete globally.’
The argument is not about what is important and what is not. The question is not what else schools should teach, but what children must master first. The answer is neither to abandon critical thinking nor return to rote learning. The answer is sequencing. Children first need a strong base. Then those foundations can be deliberately used to develop more complex competencies.
Critical thinking does not exist in a vacuum. Children need knowledge to think critically about. Problem-solving requires something to solve and the conceptual tools to solve it. Creativity is more powerful when learners have knowledge, vocabulary, confidence and the ability to communicate their ideas. Digital skills do not compensate for an inability to understand what is being read on a screen.
This is where “simplify to succeed” becomes important. Simplification does not mean lowering standards. It means identifying the standards that are non-negotiable, ensuring that they are mastered, and then building progressively from them.
Ghana already has some evidence that simplifying gets better results
There is also reason for optimism. Ghana does not need to import new solutions. The country’s experience with Differentiated Learning Plus and Complementary Basic Education provides an important lesson. DL+ uses assessment to identify where children are performing, groups learners according to their learning levels, provides targeted instruction and tracks progress.
An independent evaluation of 320 primary schools over three years. More recent evidence from UNICEF reports substantial gains among participating schools. From the 2024 NST, the proportion of Primary 4 learners in DL+ school that were below basic proficiency in reading fell from about half to roughly one-third after one year. In mathematics, the proportion below proficiency fell from 67% to 33%. (Sources: https://www.unicef.org/documents/improving-foundational-learning-scale-evidence-ghanas-differentiated-learning-plus, https://www.unicef.org/ghana/blog/inspiring-learning-through-differentiated-learning-plus-dl).
While this example does not suggest that one programme will solve Ghana’s foundational learning challenges, they demonstrate that narrowing the instructional focus and giving teachers practical tools to respond to learners at their level lead to meaningful progress. Program components like targeted instruction, structured pedagogy, regular assessment and targeted periodic teacher training with ongoing coaching all show promising results, although implementation quality matters enormously.
What should change? The National Education Forum report given to President Mahama in June 2025 has 212 recommendations. With limited time and resources, it is welcoming that the ministry is decidedly choosing to invest in foundational learning. The next steps are to decide that we need to do things differently if we expect different results. While I have shared thoughts on what we could do, but to summarise what I will prioritise in 3 points:
- Ghana should establish a small set of non-negotiable foundational learning outcomes by specific grades and years, as part of our foundational learning strategy. Without specific targets that we are rallying the education system to achieve, and the leadership and accountability needed to achieve those targets, we may be prioritizing only in speeches. Aiming at a global benchmark is vague, we need to set our own goals and work towards achieving them.
- Assessment must become more useful for instruction. A national assessment should not merely tell us that children are behind. It should help the system understand where they are behind and give teachers practical ways to respond. This calls for repositioning the National Standardised Test (NST) as a diagnosis that tells the teacher where the problems are and what needs to be done. In my conversations with teachers and district officials, I struggle to find examples of how the NST changes classroom practice.
- Teacher professional development should concentrate more heavily on the pedagogy of foundational literacy and numeracy, including assessment, explicit instruction, differentiation and remediation. We should normalise targeted remediation and build this into our curriculum and the timetable. A Primary 5 learner reading at a Primary 2 level needs support at their learning level, not simply more Primary 5 content delivered more slowly.
Foundational learning must remain a system-wide responsibility. By the time a child reaches JHS, it is too late to pretend that foundational learning is someone else’s problem. JHS teachers should not have to choose between teaching the JHS curriculum and repairing years of unresolved learning gaps. Our worry should not be why a 15-year-old failed to answer a BECE question. It is why, ten years earlier, we allowed that child to progress without mastering the skills needed to understand the question.
By Senyo Tettegah
The author is an educationist and Host of the Let’s Talk Education Africa Podcast as well as Country Manager for the Luminos Fund.