"SIERRA LEONE GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS MUST BE CLOSED DOWN FOR PRIVATE SCHOOLS," PATRIOTS EXPRESSED FURY OVER CONSTANT WIN OF PRIVATE SCHOOLS IN COURSE OF PUBLIC EXAMINATION BY BISHOP SAHR ISAAC PETERSON.

Every year, as the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) releases the National Primary School Examination (NPSE) results, a familiar, hollow ritual unfolds across Sierra Leone.

 Sirens blare through the congested streets of Freetown, WhatsApp groups explode with congratulatory banners, and photographs of beaming children in crisp, tailored uniforms grace the front pages of our national tabloids. 

Yet, beneath the flurry of confetti, the speeches, and the polished press releases issued by the Ministry of Basic and Senior Secondary Education (MBSSE), lies a stark, unrelenting truth that our society routinely glosses over: the top of the national leaderboard belongs almost exclusively to elite private preparatory schools.

Today, around 11AM, having watched the recent publication and or release of the National Primary School Examination(NPSE) results right on the Sierra Leone Broadcasting Co-operation(SLDC)--the trusted public and government channel in the nation'scapital, Freetown, I was left with awe and countless doubts, as working-class parents nervously clutching their mobile phones, refreshing SMS printouts with trembling hands. 

Their children had passed—a quiet, monumental victory against immense socio-economic odds—yet virtually none of them sat anywhere near the coveted national top ten, or even the top hundred.

Those elite spots were once again claimed by pupils from private institutions where monthly tuition fees rival or exceed the annual income of an average civil servant.

This is not a temporary anomaly or a statistical fluke; it is a deeply entrenched structural divide. Tracing the arc of top exam scores over the past half-decade confirms how thoroughly this gap has solidified. 

In 2021, when national pass rates reached historic levels, data from the MBSSE’s own learning outcome analyses revealed that private institutions held a staggering lead in aggregate T-scores across Verbal Aptitude, Quantitative Aptitude, and General Paper, despite public schools accounting for over 80% of total candidate entries.

In 2022 and 2023, top national honors belonged entirely to pupils from elite private outfits like International School Limited, Leone Preparatory School, and Murray-Deen Preparatory School—where Davies Floydalin captured the national crown with an extraordinary aggregate score of 339. 

Out of the eleven highest-performing candidates nationwide that year, virtually every single one hailed from private establishments such as Apex International, Yamakai Action Prep, and Nenneh’s Primary. 

By 2025, the national top spot was seized by Mansaray Kadijah Yawa Joe of Dele Nursery & Preparatory School with an exceptional score of 346, accompanied by top institutional honors going to private academies like Romans International and Modern Academy.

Moving through 2026, private chains like Rising Academies and established prep schools continue to post flawless pass rates, systematically filling the upper quintiles of both NPSE and Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) charts.

Why does private enterprise win so decisively year after year? 

Having walked the dust-laden corridors of public schools and the tiled hallways of private academies, the structural and administrative divide is blindingly clear. 

In a typical government primary school in Wellington, Kissy, or rural Moyamba, sixty to eighty children sit packed onto wooden benches built for thirty under a rusted, radiating corrugated tin roof. 

Dust hangs thick in the air, light is scarce, and a single teacher attempts to maintain order with little more than a piece of chalk and a frayed syllabus.

In contrast, an elite private classroom in Hill Station or Lumley seats twenty-five pupils at individual desks with rich learning materials, bright visual aids, wall charts, and teachers who run structured early morning classes, weekend mock tests, and mandatory holiday prep. 

By the time a private school pupil sits for the NPSE or BECE, they have covered the prescribed WAEC curriculum twice over and worked through a decade of past questions. 

Public school pupils, bound by administrative delays, book shortages, and fragmented academic calendars, frequently enter the examination hall having missed crucial learning modules.

Yet, setting aside chalkboards, physical facilities, and desks, the most glaring and catastrophic collapse in our public school system is human. 

We must step forward and ask the uncomfortable, systematically avoided question: How can we reasonably expect qualified, passionate teachers to step into government schools, day after day, when there is zero tangible encouragement or incentive to keep them there?

To expect a public school teacher to perform instructional miracles under the current framework is an act of willful societal delusion. Public school teachers face agonizing delays in payroll additions, unverified administrative statuses that leave them working for years as "volunteers," and meager salaries that fail to cover basic transportation, housing, and food in an inflationary economy. They are sent into academic battle without basic textbooks, teaching aids, or performance bonuses.

When a private prep school offers timely salary payments, merit bonuses, professional respect, small class sizes, and functional teaching materials, why would any ambitious, talented educator choose to remain in the public system? 

By failing to compensate and honor our public educators, we are asking them to be financial martyrs. We then express hypocritical shock when the public system yields martyrdom’s predictable result: professional burnout, widespread absenteeism, continuous turnover, and systemic academic decline.

This human resource failure leads directly into the most scandalous dimension of our national public education crisis: the documented prevalence of "ghost workers" on the government payroll—individuals drawing state salaries who do not exist, do not teach, or have long since abandoned their postings, while active, dedicated teachers in rural and urban classrooms wait years just to receive official pin-codes and baseline salaries.

Where phantom personnel siphon off public funds intended for classroom instruction, the physical schools are left haunted by an even deeper, more insidious ghost: the normalization of failure. Decades of abysmal public examination scores have bred a toxic fatalism.

 Evidently, public school administrators, district officials, and communities have grown accustomed to low scores, treating mass failure not as a national emergency requiring immediate intervention, but as an inevitable, accepted tax on being poor. When an entire system grows reverent to years of fatal error in public examinations, the exam hall ceases to be a ladder of upward social mobility; it becomes an altar of predictable sacrifice.

This foundational failure at the primary school level does not vanish when the NPSE ends; it cascades directly into the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) at Junior Secondary School (JSS) level, compounding the inequality. 

Top NPSE scorers—overwhelmingly the product of private preparatory academies—secure placement in elite, well-resourced junior secondary institutions with functional science labs and library facilities. Public school pupils, passing with marginal scores, are funneled into overcrowded, under-equipped public junior secondary schools.

By Grade 9, when these students sit for the BECE, the academic gap has widened from a crack into an insurmountable chasm. 

Over a smattering years, by records, candidates achieving the necessary credit passes in core subjects like English Language and Mathematics remain heavily concentrated in selective mission and private secondary institutions. The public system continuously feeds its own decline, filtering poorer students out of academic contention long before they ever reach Senior Secondary School or tertiary entry.

We cannot fix this multi-generational crisis with political platitudes, free exercise book distributions, or by merely celebrating rising candidate entry figures at press conferences. Broadening access to basic education without guaranteeing instructional quality is simply democratizing low standards. It is time to move past cosmetic policy wins and directly interrogate our executive educational leadership:

To the Minister of Basic and Senior Secondary Education: Why, despite years of allocating massive portions of our national budget to the Free Quality School Education initiative, has a government primary school failed to produce a single national top-ranked NPSE candidate? How do you justify the ongoing presence of thousands of payroll ghosts while real, active teachers in regional classrooms go months without verification or pay? 

What concrete, financial, and professional incentives will you introduce to attract and retain high-caliber teachers in state schools, rather than surrendering all top instructional talent to private academies?

To the Minister of Tertiary and Higher Education: Why are public teacher-training colleges and universities producing graduates who are consistently outmatched by the instructional demands of modern basic education? How can Sierra Leone expect to build a competitive, tech-driven, middle-income economy when our public basic education system functions primarily as a bottleneck that disqualifies the vast majority of public school students before they ever reach university thresholds?

Education was conceived to be the great national equalizer—the bridge that allows a child born into poverty to stand on equal footing with a child born into privilege. 

In Sierra Leone today, our examination system operates as an instrument of social stratification. When academic success requires private capital, social mobility becomes a myth. We build a self-perpetuating oligarchy where the children of the affluent receive premium instruction, dominate national exam leaderboards, capture elite secondary placements, and secure university scholarships—while children in public classrooms remain trapped by systemic neglect.

Reforming this broken dynamic requires structural equity: purging payroll ghosts, offering competitive encouragement to public school educators, enforcing strict classroom accountability, and ensuring that public spending translates into actual learning outcomes. Until a child sitting in an under-resourced public primary school in Karene, Falaba, Kono, or Moyamba can stand alongside a private prep student in Freetown and claim the top NPSE score in the nation, our national educational reform remains an unfulfilled promise. The Ministers must answer: when will quality education belong to every Sierra Leonean child, and not just to those who can afford the bill?

© Bishop Sahr Isaac Peterson 

Youth and Students Advocate 

Academic Commentator 

100 Most Influential Youth Leaders Award Winner, West Africa, 2026

President at Association of Pan-African Authors, APA-SL 

Vice President at Poetry Reading Club, Sierra Leone .

CEO at Coalition of Public Speakers and Modern Writers, CoPsMoW-SL.