The revelation that 7,188 primary school learners will have to retake the 2025/26 Primary Leaving Examinations after investigations uncovered mass cheating is deeply disturbing.

This is not simply an examination irregularity but a major failure by adults entrusted with the responsibility of educating, guiding and protecting our children.

The learners caught up in this scandal are, in many respects, victims. Children do not design elaborate schemes to compromise national examinations. Where cheating happens on such a scale, there are inevitably adults who enabled it, facilitated it, looked the other way or actively participated.

Those adults must be identified and held fully accountable.

National examinations are an important measure of whether learners have acquired the competencies expected at a particular stage of education. Once that process is manipulated, the entire education system is compromised.

More worrying is the message such conduct sends to children. Schools are supposed to teach integrity, hard work and personal responsibility. It is therefore difficult to imagine a greater contradiction than adults teaching children that dishonesty is acceptable so long as it produces desirable results.

Authorities should also interrogate what incentives may be driving such behaviour.

Over the years, schools have increasingly been judged by pass rates and their positions in performance rankings. While healthy competition can encourage improvement, education cannot be reduced to a race for examination statistics.

When administrators begin treating high pass rates as a measure of prestige, attracting parents or protecting reputations, the danger is that learning itself becomes secondary.

Government should seriously consider whether the practice of ranking schools on national examination performance still serves the interests of education. Rwanda previously operated without the intense public ranking culture that has taken root in recent years. There is merit in revisiting that approach.

A school should be judged by the quality of education it provides, how well it develops its learners, the competence of its teachers, discipline, creativity and the values it instils—not simply by how many pupils score highly in a national examination.

We must not commoditise education.

The response to this scandal must therefore go beyond ordering learners to retake examinations. Every teacher, administrator, examination official or other adult found to have participated should face appropriate administrative and, where applicable, legal consequences.

Children should enter examination rooms knowing that their future depends on what they have learnt and the effort they have put in—not on adults manipulating the system on their behalf.

Anything less undermines both the integrity of our examinations and the very purpose of education.