On the 2023 PSLCE and JCE exam results & the coming curriculum review in Malawi

That this year’s Primary School Leaving Certificate Education examination (PSLCE) results in Malawi show improvements from last year is worth commenting on. The overall pass rate has gone up by 4 percent, from 83 percent in 2022, to 87 percent in 2023. The number of students who have passed has also gone up from last year. Last year 216,664 students passed the exam, this year that number is 234,645. This year 7,000 more students sat the exam.

Both girls and boys have improved their pass rates. The girls have improved by 6 percent, from 78 percent last year to 84 percent this year, while the boys have improved by 2 percent, from 88 percent last year to 90 percent this year. However, the pass rate for Special Needs Education students has gone down by 5 percent, from 76 percent last year, to 71 percent this year.

These improvements are remarkable. They show that despite everything that was thrown at the system in the past academic year, from climate crises to health emergencies, to the economic hardship the country is going through, some things in the education system are working well. It is delightful to see girls improving by six percent, and boys reaching the 90 percent pass rate. If the girls can achieve another 6 percent improvement next year, they too will reach the 90 percent pass rate. That would be outstanding. For SNE students, something needs to be done; their results should be going up, not down.

That said, selection to secondary school in Malawi remains a big worry. Only 41 percent of those who have passed have been selected into secondary schools. It has been 59 years since independence, and despite the many secondary schools constructed across the country, we still have very few of them, given the size of our population. Currently there are 250 new secondary schools being constructed and/or expanded, through various projects funded by development partners, and taxpayer money.

But we have a long way to go to reach a 100 percent transition rate, as per the 2030 target. That would require constructing more than the current number of secondary schools by 2030. Statistics from the Ministry of Education show that in 2022, there were 1,610 secondary schools in the country. This number should not be taken literally, because 327 of those schools were categorised as “Open.” Students in the “Open” system use the premises of existing government-run secondary schools, in the afternoon, after their conventional colleagues. They are enrolled and managed through the school’s own arrangement, rather than the government.

If we remove the Open schools, we remain with 1,283 schools that are real and have physical infrastructure of their own. Out of these, in the 2022 academic year, 365 were private, leaving 918 as the number of government-run secondary schools. Out of the 918 government-run secondary schools, 774 were Community Day Secondary Schools (CDSSs), representing 84 percent. What all this means is that even if we had some inexplicable windfall and managed to construct another 1,283 new secondary schools in seven years, we would still not be able to achieve a 100 percent primary school transition rate.

For one thing, a population growth rate of 2.9 percent means that the number of students keeps increasing every year. A pertinent observation that needs to be made is that the secondary school net enrolment is only 16.6 percent, meaning that a whopping 83.4 percent of the country’s 14-17 year olds are not attending secondary school (this week a report by Afrobarometer and the Mastercard Foundation said 66 percent of African youth were now attending secondary school). We would need to construct a far bigger number of secondary schools to accommodate the anticipated growth in enrolment.

The number of learners who sat the 2023 PSLCE examination is just one quarter of the number that enrolled in Standard One, eight years ago. In the 2015/2016 school year, there were an estimated 1.1 million learners in the country’s Standard One classrooms. New entrants numbered around 800,000, and another 300,000 were repeating. Eight years later, only 267,330 learners made it to Standard 8 and sat the exam. There is a reason to believe that completion and survival rates will gradually improve. We should therefore anticipate far greater numbers of learners who complete primary school, and will be looking for secondary school spaces.

We could try adopting a double shift system, currently utilised by only 4 percent of secondary schools, but the quality of the education offered would be hugely compromised. We already have the evidence for this. The gap between internal, external and ODeL students in this year’s Junior Certificate of Education (JCE) examination results is alarming. Whereas internal candidates passed at a rate of 85.5 percent, the pass rate for external candidates is 53.8 percent. That is a 31-percentage difference. It is worse for Open Distance and eLearning students, whose pass rate is 47 percent, a 38 percent gap with internal students. These differences point to huge inequalities in school conditions and resources available to the different categories of secondary school students.

Considering that in the 59 years since independence, we have managed to construct 1,283 secondary schools, and only 918 are public, Malawi’s hope for expanding secondary education access lies in alternative means of provision. Of particular interest is Open Distance and eLearning. In 2020, the Ministry of Education established two new directorates, namely Open Distance and eLearning (DODeL), and Science, Technology and Innovation (DSTI). Between these two new directorates, the Ministry of Education is developing new strategies to bring new ways of thinking and operating to solve the serious bottlenecks that have hamstrung the country’s education system for decades. That is where there are realistic chances that access to quality secondary school education can be widened, in the 7 years remaining to 2030.

The human capital development imperative to provide secondary and further education to more Malawians is overwhelming. The 2018 Population and Housing Census revealed that only 7.1 percent of Malawian adults have a Malawi School Certificate of Education (MSCE) or its equivalent. Put differently, 92.9 percent of adult Malawians do not have a secondary school qualification. The census also reported that only 2.9 percent of adult Malawians have acquired tertiary education.

As the country’s struggles to make education available to more Malawians, a more poignant question will be on the type of education that should be provided. And this is the right time to be asking this question. The Malawi Institute of Education, the country’s national curriculum centre, is embarking on national consultations as part of a curriculum review for primary, secondary and teacher education. There are a lot of issues that the curriculum review process needs to look at, but the topmost three, in my view, are the Malawi 2063 vision, recent health and climate emergencies, and the role of technology in education.

The Malawi 2063 vision and it’s First Ten Year Implementation Plan (MIP-1) are very important developments, especially the three pillars (agriculture, industrialisation, and urbanisation) and the seven enablers. Each of the seven enablers is crucial and needs to be incorporated into the curriculum, but two of them offer a starting point for the education system, namely mindset change, and human capital development.

The past three years have been characterised by health and climate emergencies, including the Covid-19 pandemic, a cholera outbreak, and devastating cyclones. The education system needs to incorporate content that will prepare young Malawians for emergencies such as these, in order to prevent, manage, and address them. The hope of human capital development and the resultant demographic dividend is that of freeing the mind and unleashing the potential of each individual to contribute to society.

Technology use in education can enable a lot of learning, but it can also cause a lot of harm. We need to weigh the costs and benefits of incorporating advanced technology at every level of the curriculum. The curriculum needs to provide knowledge on the positive and negative effects of technology use in education, so that young Malawians have the knowledge for making the best choices. As the title of the 2023 Global Education Monitoring Report, released in July, 2023, aptly puts it - Technology in Education: A Tool on Whose Terms?

Ultimately, we need to be realistic as to what a curriculum review can do and cannot do. The curriculum process needs to be seen as only part of a very complex educational equation. We can have a great curriculum, but if it is not properly resourced, and if teachers are not adequately educated and motivated, the curriculum can achieve little. The broader social, economic and political milieu goes a long way in determining what a curriculum can achieve for a society.

Malawi needs an education system that prepares students for current challenges, but also for future problems unknown today. Therefore curriculum and pedagogy need to embrace knowledges, skills, attitudes and values that will enable graduates to think critically and creatively, to be innovative, to have uMunthu, to promote peace and wellbeing, and to help propel Malawi towards becoming the inclusively wealthy, industrialised and self-reliant nation we aspire to be.

What's the matter with Malawian universities?

When a university student performs poorly and is withdrawn, the problem is with the student. But when 132 students perform poorly and are withdrawn, then the problem is no longer with the student alone. The university itself has a problem. When it is two universities, then it is not just the universities that have a problem, it is the broader national educational system.

It is instructive to scrutinise the numbers. The number 132 comes from the Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources (LUANAR), out of a first year class of 700. Granted that a few were withdrawn from second and third years, but LUANAR authorities are on record to have said the majority are first year students. That figure, 132, is almost one fifth of the class; 19 per cent, to be precise. From Chancellor College the number withdrawn is said to be 116.

In the 2012-2013 academic year, the group speculated to have yielded the mass weeding, Chancellor College admitted 399 students. This is based on records uploaded on the University of Malawi’s website on 25^th September 2012. If these numbers are accurate, 116 out of 399 is 29 per cent. 

A few theories as to how such numbers could be withdrawn in one year have dominated commentary on social media, in newspaper columns, and on the street. The list includes: the results of cheating at MSCE; the quota system, poor preparation in secondary school, capacity problems in the universities in question, and students entering university too young, among others. Both LUANAR and Unima say they have investigated the causes of this massive performance failure, and will be releasing reports. So it is difficult at this point to pin down any single cause.

Will the new Malawi University of Science and Technology 
herald a new approach to higher education?

But some of the reasons thus floated are less likely to be causes of the problem. Cheating at MSCE is less likely a cause of the poor performance because selection into either Unima or LUANAR is not based on MSCE results only; students sit an entrance examination. Selection is based on an aggregate of both the MSCE and the entrance exam. If an exam is the problem, then it is both the university entrance exam and the MSCE.

The quota system is also an unlikely single cause. The majority of students entering Unima and LUANAR these days are coming from elite schools and well-to-do families. Joseph Patel, president of the Independent Schools Association of Malawi (ISAMA) says private schools contribute 80 per cent of students entering Malawian universities every year.

Researchers Stella Kaabwe and Lillian Kamtengeni estimate that 91 per cent of university students in Malawi come from wealthy families. Poor families send less than one per cent. The remaining eight per cent are from somewhere in the middle. The double bar system of two exams means that whoever ends up getting selected has merited their place.

Most of these students will have gone to very good secondary schools. If you are in doubt, next time the university selections are announced just look at the full-page congratulatory advertisements from elite schools listing their students who have been selected. And many of these students will have received specialised university entrance exams coaching. For most students, you have to come from a well-to-do family background to afford an expensive private school, and the exams coaching. 

If cheating at MSCE and the quota system are not plausible explanations, the other suggested causes have a higher likelihood: poor preparation in secondary school, capacity problems in the universities, and students entering university too young. Let’s briefly examine each in turn. Poor preparation in secondary school sounds counter-intuitive, considering that many of the students are said to be coming from elite secondary schools. One lecturer, quoted in a Nyasatimes article, said many students struggle with English, while some students speak perfect English but have very poor writing skills.

This raises the question of what the MSCE and University Entrance Exam measure. Do they measure what a student knows? Or do they measure a student’s reasoning capability and aptitude? Or both? Is it possible for one to be coached perfectly and pass the entrance exam when their aptitude cannot withstand the rigours of higher level reasoning?

Many students these days are learning to speak perfect English without grasping the fundamentals of reading, writing and reasoning in that language, let alone in their mother tongue. The reason for this, as argued by language education researchers, is that learners learn best using a language they are familiar with. Learning in a familiar language facilitates not just learning but reasoning, writing and problem solving.

Our problem in Malawi is not that we are introducing English too early, no. It is that we are abandoning the familiar language too early, before children have developed important faculties such as reasoning, arguing, writing, problem solving and discovering. The best education systems in the world teach their children using a language they are familiar with, and then add a second language such as English for non-English speaking societies.

What Malawian private schools are doing, abandoning local languages very early in a child’s development stages, is going to affect intellectual aptitude in later academic life. The stipulation in the new Education Act to make English the language of instruction from Standard 1 is a big mistake. It has no basis in language education research. It is Malawian children who will pay the price for this mistake in later life. The solution would have been to introduce a multi-lingual policy, with a deliberate provision to strengthen local languages. This needs resources, but it is a worthy national investment decades down the line.

At the secondary level, our secondary schools are going through a troubled period, an extension of poor preparation in early childhood and primary school. Secondary school teachers in government schools report large, overcrowded classrooms. There are very few books such that in some cases ten students have to share one copy. Reading is the foundation for intellectual development. We have students who finish Form Four without finishing a single prescribed literature book.

Another explanation offered thus far has been capacity problems in the university. As Dr. Boniface Dulani of Chancellor College told me in a private conversation, accommodation problems in the universities and in surrounding areas mean that some students reside in conditions that make it difficult for them to concentrate on their education. Some are residing in houses with no electricity or running water, far from campus. Dr. Dulani also bemoans the unpreparedness of those that come too young. At 14 or 15, one is too young for the university, unless one is a certified genius. There are geniuses and child prodigies alright, but it cannot be everyone.

Some classes are very large and are a burden for the lecturers, as Dr. Dulani indicates. Without a system of Teaching Assistants or Graduate Instructors as is the case in US universities, students have no opportunity for extra help. The culture of consultancies also means that attention to individual students has to compete with attention to a lecturer’s other responsibilities and needs.

The Ministry of Education, Science and Technology is quoted as having received reports from the universities on what has happened for such large numbers of students to have performed so miserably. There are a number of questions one hopes the reports have provided answers to: What are the percentages of students withdrawn from particular years? What is the ratio of male to female students withdrawn? What is the proportion of those on the parallel system to those on residential? What disciplines have been most affected?

We will also need to know what support services are available to students, from their lecturers and from their respective administrations. How many of these students came from private schools? How many from government schools? How about community day secondary schools? How many received coaching for the entrance examinations?

Only a holistic analysis can provide answers to these and other questions. This is more than about the students alone. It is about the entire education system and its recent history.


Note: A shorter version of this article was published in The Malawi News of 14th December 2013 under a different title.