If School Placement Rewards Performance, What Happens to the Child Who Needs the Most Support?

Ghana’s secondary school placement system raises a fundamental question that deserves serious attention: What exactly is the basis for categorising our secondary schools into A, B and C?

Is it infrastructure? Teaching and learning resources? Teacher competency? Academic performance? A combination of these factors? If these are part of the criteria, then we need to examine what the categorisation means for the children who are placed in these schools.

Consider a student who performs exceptionally well in the BECE. That student is more likely to gain access to a school with better facilities, stronger academic records and greater resources. Now consider another student who performs poorly in the same examination. That student may end up in a school with fewer resources and weaker facilities.

But isn’t that the student who arguably needs the strongest academic support?

We seem to have created a system where performance determines access to opportunity, even though the students who perform poorly may be the ones who need better learning environments the most.

I am not arguing that high-performing students should not have access to good schools. They have earned their results, and merit should matter.

The question is whether educational opportunity should end where examination performance begins.

A student who scores poorly in the BECE is not necessarily incapable of learning. There could be gaps in foundational knowledge, poor teaching, difficult home circumstances, limited learning support, language barriers, examination anxiety or other factors behind that performance.

If we place such a student in an under-resourced environment, we risk making the problem worse.

This is where the principle of inclusive education becomes important.

Inclusive education should not simply mean putting children with different abilities within the same education system. It should also mean creating conditions that give different learners a fair opportunity to succeed.

So what should change?
First, the classification of schools should be made transparent. Parents and the public should know exactly why a school is classified as A, B or C and what indicators are used. If the classification is based on infrastructure, teacher strength, academic outcomes and other measurable indicators, the Ministry of Education should publish those criteria.

Second, school placement should not rely solely on BECE performance. A student’s examination score should remain an important factor, but it should not be the only measure determining access to educational opportunity.

The placement system should incorporate a more deliberate equity mechanism.

For example, a defined proportion of places in well-resourced schools could be reserved for students from disadvantaged backgrounds, deprived districts and students whose academic performance suggests that they would benefit significantly from stronger intervention.

Third, government must invest heavily in schools that consistently receive lower-performing students.

This is critical.
It makes little sense to identify schools as under-resourced and then continue sending students who need substantial academic support into those same conditions without providing the resources required to improve their outcomes.

If we know that some schools have shortages of qualified teachers, laboratories, libraries, ICT facilities or adequate classrooms, those gaps should become a priority for targeted government investment.

Fourth, we should introduce stronger academic support programmes at the secondary level.

Students entering SHS with significant learning gaps should not simply be admitted, given a timetable and expected to catch up on their own. Schools should receive additional resources to run structured remediation programmes in literacy, numeracy and other foundational areas.

And there should be measurable outcomes.

If a school receives additional resources to support academically weaker students, we should be able to track whether those interventions are actually improving learning outcomes.

Finally, we need to stop treating school quality as something that students must compete for instead of something the state should progressively provide.

The long-term objective should not be to make every school identical. That is unrealistic.

The objective should be to reduce the quality gap between schools to a point where a child’s future is not heavily determined by the particular school to which the placement system sends them.

We can continue rewarding academic excellence while also deliberately supporting students who are struggling.

Those two objectives are not mutually exclusive.

The bigger policy question, therefore, is not simply whether a student deserves a particular school because of their BECE results.

It is whether our placement system is designed merely to sort students according to what they have already achieved, or whether it is designed to help every student achieve more than they have already demonstrated.

If our education system is serious about equity, then school placement cannot be the end of the conversation.

It has to be part of a broader strategy for ensuring that where a child is placed does not determine how far that child can go.