The fundamental purpose of a country’s education system is not to produce certificates, but to prepare people for life and responsible civic participation in society.
Knowledge, skills, values and qualifications matter. However, certificates, diplomas and degrees are neither guarantees of success nor entitlements to future opportunities.
A sound education system should, therefore, prepare learners to coexist with others, navigate life’s challenges, think critically and logically, act responsibly and contribute to the greater common good.
Predominantly, at its core must be respect for human dignity and worthiness, justice, peace and the development of the whole person.
This is why I have always believed that the success of an education system should not be measured solely by how many of its students emerge at the top of national examinations.
We should also ask a more fundamental and necessary question: What happens to the learner who enters school struggling academically?
A good school should not merely identify the brightest learners; it should also transform those who need the greatest support into capable, confident and responsible citizens. The real test of an education system is its capacity to unlock the hidden potential in learners.
As usual, the 2026 Malawi School Certificate of Education (MSCE) examination results has prompted public praise for the country’s top-performing schools.
Several Catholic and other privately managed schools feature prominently in these rankings, leading some members of the public to hastily suggest that government should adopt their approach.
There is certainly much to learn from schools that achieve strong academic results. However, comparisons between schools require us to understand how those schools operate before drawing conclusions about their performance.
Some Catholic secondary schools, particularly those with highly selective admission or retention practices, may have significantly different student profiles by the time learners sit for the MSCE examinations.
In some cases, learners in these schools who struggle academically or fail to meet particular academic or behavioural expectations may leave the school before completing the cycle.
Government secondary schools operate under a totally different social mandate. They education as a public good and are expected to serve learners from diverse backgrounds and with widely varying academic abilities.
They cannot simply select the strongest learners and remove those who struggle. Their responsibility is to educate the whole intake and ensure completion rates.
This distinction matters.
When two schools sit the same national examination but arrive at that examination with substantially different student-selection histories, their results can be compared, but they should not automatically be treated as evidence of identical educational models.
If Malawi genuinely wants to learn from high-performing schools, it should study what can legitimately be transferred: effective teaching and learning practices, leadership, discipline, teacher support, parental engagement, learner motivation, institutional culture and efficient use of resources.
But we should be careful not to copy outcomes without understanding the systems that produced them.
Our public schools should not be judged only by the number of students who achieve distinctions from schools that operate at opposing assessment criteria.
They should also be recognised for the difficult and important work of taking learners as they are and helping them become better than they were when they enrolled in Form One.
Education is ultimately about more than producing examination results. It is about forming people who can think, work and live responsibly with others and face the uncertainties of life with confidence, humility and integrity.
The measure of a truly successful education system, therefore, is not simply how many students reach the top ten. It is how many lives it lifts along the way.
