EXPERT OPINION: Kano, Abia and Metrics of Educational Success in the 2025 NECO Results, By Mohammed Bello

EXPERT OPINION: Kano, Abia and Metrics of Educational Success in the 2025 NECO Results

By Mohammed Bello

The release of the 2025 National Examinations Council (NECO) results has ignited a critical, albeit often mischaracterised, public discourse surrounding the comparative performance of Kano and Abia States. At the heart of this debate lies a fundamental question: What constitutes educational excellence?

As a research and development expert with significant biases in education, I contend that this moment offers an opportunity to transcend superficial rankings and embrace a more nuanced, evidence-based framework for evaluating systemic performance.

Metric 1: Total Volume of Success – The Kano Paradigm

The first metric dominating public discourse is Total Volume of Success, which emphasises the absolute number of candidates who attained the benchmark of five credits, including English and Mathematics. By this measure, Kano State leads, having produced the highest number of successful candidates nationally (Umar, 2025).

What It Captures: Scale and Systemic Reach

This metric reflects the capacity of a state’s education system to deliver mass access to certification, particularly in contexts with large and youthful populations. It speaks to the gross contribution to national human capital, suggesting that Kano, by virtue of its demographic weight, is a key player in supplying qualified individuals to tertiary institutions and the labour market.

What It Conceals: Efficiency and Equity

However, this metric is inherently volume-centric and therefore insufficient as a standalone indicator of performance quality. It fails to account for internal efficiency, the proportion of candidates who succeed relative to those who sit for the exam. For instance, if a state registers 100,000 candidates and 50,000 pass, the volume of success is high, but the failure rate is equally significant at 50%. This raises questions about instructional quality, resource utilisation, and systemic equity. Moreover, volume metrics can obscure regional disparities, gender gaps, and variations in school-level performance, offering a macro-level view that may not accurately reflect the lived realities of learners and educators.

Metric 2: Pass Rate – The Abia Paradigm

The second metric shaping the public discourse on the 2025 NECO results is the Pass Rate, defined as the proportion of candidates who sat for the examination and successfully attained the minimum benchmark, typically five credits including English and Mathematics (Premium Times, 2025). By this measure, Abia State and other southeastern states have emerged as top performers, registering significantly higher pass rates than their northern counterparts, including Kano.

What It Captures: Systemic Efficiency and Instructional Quality

Pass rate is widely regarded as the gold standard in educational performance metrics, particularly within international frameworks such as those of the OECD (2024) and UNESCO. It reflects a system’s ability to convert educational inputs into successful outcomes, offering a direct measure of instructional effectiveness, curriculum delivery, and learner support. A high pass rate suggests that the majority of students under the system’s care are receiving adequate preparation and are being guided effectively toward academic success.

This metric also aligns with principles of value for investment, indicating that public resources allocated to education are yielding measurable returns in terms of student achievement. It is especially useful for benchmarking performance across jurisdictions with varying population sizes, as it normalises outcomes relative to the number of participants involved.

What It Conceals: Inclusivity and Systemic Reach

However, the pass rate metric is not without limitations. A high pass rate may inadvertently mask exclusionary practices. For instance, if a state achieves an 85% pass rate but only registers a fraction of its eligible youth for the exam, the metric may reflect success for a selective or privileged subset, rather than the broader population. This raises concerns about access, equity, and dropout rates, particularly in contexts where socioeconomic barriers or systemic inefficiencies prevent full participation.

Moreover, pass rate alone does not account for variability in school-level performance, nor does it reflect the quality of learning beyond examination success, such as critical thinking, creativity, or civic competence. In essence, while Abia’s high pass rate is a strong indicator of educational efficiency and instructional quality, it must be interpreted alongside metrics of access, equity, and systemic inclusivity to provide a holistic view of educational success. When triangulated with volume metrics and contextual indicators, pass rate becomes a powerful tool for diagnosing strengths and identifying areas for reform.

Global Best Practices: Redefining Educational Excellence

To credibly identify the “best-performing” state in the context of the 2025 NECO results, it is imperative to move beyond simplistic metrics such as raw pass counts or unadjusted percentages. Leading international education bodies, including the World Bank (2023) and OECD, advocate for a multidimensional approach that incorporates contextual equity, systemic efficiency, and longitudinal growth. This reframing allows for a more accurate and just evaluation of educational systems, particularly in diverse and unequal societies.

Best Practice 1: Prioritising Quality through the Demographically Adjusted Pass Rate

While the pass rate, the proportion of candidates who meet the benchmark, is a widely accepted measure of instructional efficiency, it is not sufficient on its own to determine systemic excellence. A high pass rate indicates that a state’s education system is effectively converting its student cohort into qualified graduates. However, this metric assumes a level playing field, which rarely exists in practice.

To address this, global best practice recommends the use of a Demographically Adjusted Pass Rate (DAPR), a methodology increasingly adopted by institutions such as the Urban Institute (2024). DAPR evaluates student outcomes relative to their socioeconomic and demographic context, asking: How well did students perform compared to peers facing similar structural challenges nationwide?

Application: Contextualising Kano and Abia

Consider the case of Kano, with a reported pass rate of 49.8%, and Abia, with 83.3%. On the surface, Abia appears to outperform Kano. However, when contextual factors are introduced, such as poverty incidence, parental education levels, school infrastructure, and teacher-student ratios, the interpretation shifts.

If Kano’s students are disproportionately affected by economic hardship, conflict exposure, and systemic underinvestment, then achieving a near-50% pass rate may reflect exceptional value-added performance. In contrast, Abia’s higher pass rate, while commendable, may be partially attributed to more favourable baseline conditions. Thus, DAPR allows us to distinguish between raw achievement and contextual excellence, the latter being a more meaningful indicator of a system’s transformative capacity.

Best Practice 2: The Inclusivity Index – Measuring Quality Through Equity

In the pursuit of defining the “best-performing” state in education, it is insufficient to rely solely on metrics of academic achievement. A truly high-performing education system must demonstrate not only quality but also reach, ensuring that all children, regardless of background, have equitable access to learning opportunities. This principle underpins the Inclusivity Index, a composite metric that integrates both efficiency and access, offering a more holistic lens for evaluating systemic performance.

Formula: Inclusivity Index = Pass Rate × (Student Enrollment ÷ Examination Rate)

This formula captures the dual imperative of education systems: to deliver high-quality outcomes (pass rate) while ensuring broad participation (enrollment relative to exam registration). It penalises systems that achieve high pass rates by excluding large segments of the eligible population, and rewards those that combine instructional effectiveness with mass access.

Kano’s Strengths: Scale as a Strategic Asset

Kano, as one of Nigeria’s most populous states, likely scores highly on the access dimension of the Inclusivity Index. Its large candidate pool reflects a system that is reaching a broad swath of its youth population, contributing significantly to national human capital development (UNESCO, 2023). Even with a moderate pass rate, Kano’s ability to bring tens of thousands of students into the examination pipeline is a testament to its mass education infrastructure. However, without contextualising this volume against the total eligible student population and the quality of outcomes, the metric risks overstating performance. High enrollment must be matched by meaningful achievement to reflect true systemic strength.

Defining the Ideal Performer: Quality × Reach × Growth

The optimal education system achieves a high pass rate (quality), a high enrollment-to-examination ratio (access), and demonstrates year-on-year improvement (growth). For example, a state with an 80% pass rate among 20,000 students may be outperformed by a state with a 70% pass rate among 100,000 students, provided the latter is expanding access and improving outcomes over time. This approach aligns with global education benchmarks, which emphasise inclusive excellence, the ability to deliver strong outcomes across diverse populations, not just elite subsets. It also encourages systems to invest in retention, equity, and outreach, rather than optimising for narrow success metrics.

Conclusion

The public debate surrounding the 2025 NECO results, particularly the comparative performance of Kano and Abia States, reveals a troubling reliance on reductive metrics that obscure the true nature of educational success. The framing of this discourse as a binary contest between volume and efficiency presents a false dichotomy. Kano’s dominance in absolute numbers reflects demographic scale, while Abia’s superior pass rate signals instructional efficiency. Both metrics offer partial truths, but neither alone suffices to define systemic excellence.

As education researchers and policy analysts, we bear a responsibility to elevate the conversation beyond superficial rankings and toward evidence-based evaluation frameworks. This requires a shift in public understanding and policymaking priorities:

Deconstruct the Myth of Raw Volume: High candidate volume is a statistical consequence of population size, not a proxy for educational quality. Celebrating raw numbers without contextualising them against pass rates, dropout rates, and demographic coverage risks rewarding scale over substance. Volume must be interpreted as reach, not rigour.

Prioritise Percentage Change and Longitudinal Growth: Static metrics offer limited insight. Instead, we must track year-on-year improvements in both Pass Rate and the Inclusivity Index, a composite measure that captures the intersection of access and achievement. This approach reflects the effectiveness of policy interventions, resource deployment, and system responsiveness. As the World Bank (2023) emphasises, growth trajectories are more telling than snapshots.

Demand Disaggregated Data for Equity Analysis: To understand who the system is serving, and who it is failing, performance data must be disaggregated by rural/urban location, gender, socioeconomic status, and school type. Without this granularity, achievement gaps remain hidden, and interventions risk reinforcing existing inequalities. The OECD (2024) underscores that equity is not a peripheral concern; it is central to educational quality.

Mohammed Bello is the Chief Executive Officer, African Centre for Innovative Research and Development (AFRI-CIRD). He writes from Kano.