The entire nation is patiently waiting for three major changes that will affect the conduct of the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) and the West African Senior Secondary School Certificate Examination in Ghana. These changes are inevitable, and WAEC has little or no control over them.
The Ghana Education Service (GES) and the Ministry of Education (MoE) must also start planning how to communicate the new changes that will affect the conduct of the BECE and WASSCE in 2027.
In 2029, Ghana moved away from the old curriculum and rushed to introduce what came to be known as the ‘Common Core Curriculum Programme’; by 2021, it had introduced the Junior High School version of the same curriculum. The basic 7 to 9 curriculum had an extended version called ‘Grade 10′, which was supposed to be taught in Grade 10, which is the current SHS1 in our Senior High Schools.
These changes, which were introduced at the pre-senior high school level, affected not only teachers and schools but also students. It challenged educators and their students to shift from rote learning to critical thinking and reasoning so that questions are set to examine students’ ability to apply knowledge to solving real-world problems.
These changes finally led to the new BECE exam question modalities. This was reflected in the way WAEC set the 2024 and 2025 BECE questions, thus a massive shift in question structure style.
While the new curriculum has not been fully implemented, there is a big change coming again. For instance, the French language is supposed to have an oral aspect, yet it has remained a written exam with no real orals.
The above background information is necessary for readers to appreciate the shift that will take place in 2027 as far as the BECE and WASSCE are concerned.
The new Common Core Curriculum produced its first BECE graduates in 2024. These candidates will be in year three in the 2026/2027 academic year. This means that the same candidates will be the first batch of WASSCE students to be examined with questions based on the new common core curriculum. These students have been introduced to the Common Core Curriculum from grade 6 and will now sit the first-ever Common Core Curriculum standard WASSCE in 2027.
Coincidentally, WAEC has also disclosed that the 2026 WASSCE will be the last to be administered to school candidates based on the old curriculum. This will bring to an end over a decade of existence and use of the old secondary school syllabus. That said, WAEC will, however, continue to administer private WASSCE based on the old curriculum for a period of four years, after which the curriculum will be retired forever. What this means is that any student who studied and sat for the WASSCE under the old curriculum and still wants to resit the examination must sit and pass the exam before the end of 2030.
The third major change that will take place relates more to the BECE. In 2025, the Ministry of Education approved for use the Beacon of Light, a literature reader for the Junior High School, leading to the retarding of the famous Cockcrow literature book introduced at the Junior High School level in 2010.
The book was introduced a year late, and it also took close to a year for the book to hit the market. By the time this book hit the market, the first batch of Junior High School candidates who would be examined with it at the BECE level were in Basic 7 – Term 3.
These students are currently in grade 8 and will sit the BECE in 2027. They will be the first batch of students to be examined with the Beacon of Light for the BECE English Language Literature section.
These three changes are not isolated and not out of the blue. Teachers, parents, students, and general education stakeholders are expected to have a lot to say about these inevitable changes outlined in this post