COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF WASSCE CORE SUBJECTS FROM 2016 TO 2020 Prince Hamid Armah, PhD i Kwasi Opoku-Amankwa, PhD ii Today, the ever-growing focus on equal access to quality education in policy proposals for education in Ghana is glaring, following the recent spike in the number of policies designed from September 2017. Ghana’s recent history has been characterized by increasing focus in equal access to quality education for Ghanaian children, reflected in the various policy interventions crafted to support outcomes for students and families, especially for those who are historically disadvantaged and underserved. This is in recognition of education’s outsized role in national development and how it can bridge inequalities and level out life outcomes. In September 2017, Ghana began to implement an ‘extended basic education’ system which makes senior high school (SHS) education free and inclusive. For policy formulators, a number of contexts underlined the design and implementation of this free, inclusive education regime. These include a perennial weak transition problem (especially for pupils from basic education to secondary), imbalances in education access, the need to fight poverty and crime and stimulate improved civic life, health and living conditions as well as economic growth for the people of Ghana. In respect of weak transition for instance, from the 2010/11 to 2016/17 academic years, out of a total of 4,000,000 pupils who started primary school, only 500,000 students were enrolled in senior high education (Education Management Information System (EMIS) data, 2010-2017), indicating that a significant majority of students (i.e., 3,500,000 students) could not gain access to senior high school. The BECE ‘stanine’ norm-referenced grading system, built on a highly ‘selective’ modality, had played a long-standing part in compounding the problem of limited access to secondary education, year on year. Further, it is apparent from the 2012/13 and 2016/17 Ghana Living Standard Survey (GLSS) data that substantial inequities in access to education exist across the various wealth quintiles, with students coming from the poorest 20% of households at an acute disadvantage when it comes to accessing secondary education. Despite the obvious justifications, the roll out of the Free SHS policy was met with disquiet in certain quarters, with some critics arguing that it would lead to a compromise in the quality of education on offer to Ghanaian children. On the back of these concerns, it has become necessary to examine and compare the performance of the first graduates produced under the Free SHS policy to previous years’ performances, particularly the academic year preceding the implementation of the policy. Table 1 and Figure 1 show the percentage of candidates obtaining the tertiary education qualifying grades (TEQG) (A1- C6) in the WASSCE core subjects in the past five years.