Why students are leaving secondary school before graduation

A subject teacher must have had enough when his students told him to his face that they were not going to write his test. "We are not going to do Second Term here anyway, so you can fail us this term." Mr Daniel is one of many teachers working in a private school around Ikotun who is discouraged by the number of secondary school pupils leaving school just before they write their certificate examinations.

These students believe that they have found a more interesting path instead of completing a certificate class, be it JSS3 or SSS3. Instead of writing the West Africa Examinations Council (WAEC) papers at the end of Second Term in SS3, these pupils plan to withdraw from their secondary school and register themselves at a tutorial centre just for the purpose of writing their WAEC exams outside the four walls of a conventional school. 

Students are not making this decision alone, their parents are backing them up. In fact, many parents are the ones considering sending their children to tutorial centres. The tutorial centres only need to give the students and their parents a little nudge.

Most tutorial centres are promising a better bargain in terms of the cost of taking a certificate exam and the possibility of obtaining favourable results after such exams. So parents are enticed by the offer to pay no tuition fee, they only need to pay a token each month before the certificate exam and then pay for the registration of their wards for the examination. 

In the end, it may even be more expensive to keep a child in a tutorial centre than to keep that child in a secondary school, but parents somehow have an assurance that it is a better investment. The parents are promised that their children will pass all of their examinations convincingly irrespective of their previous academic performances. They are the real magicians!

Joking apart, both parents and children seem not to bother if the tutorial centres use ethical or unethical methods to help the students pass these exams. The end must justify the means for them. The only challenge for parents will be to keep maintaining these means in post-secondary school circumstances. There is also the question of how schools and tutorial centres function so differently when they both promise the same results through the same methods. 

For one, students are not asked to repeat classes at tutorials. The parents can choose when the child goes to 'school' and when not. It seems tutorial centres offer parents and students total control over the learning process. The student who has repeated SSS2 multiple times can leave her or his secondary school and join a tutorial centre to study for a few months before writing the final exams required of SSS3 students. If the student is still not up to the task, they can be helped with "special intervention". This is surely why most tutorial centres are more appealing to students than secondary schools. Most tutorial centres offer an unethical helping hand that some secondary schools still refuse to offer.