Admission To Senior High Schools - Mopping Up Begins

The Ghana Education Service (GES) will this week begin a mopping up exercise to place candidates who were not placed in schools during the initial placement.

This exercise is to ensure that qualified but unplaced candidates gain admission to senior high and technical institutions to enable them to join their colleagues by the first week of November for serious academic work.

The Director of Basic and Secondary Education, Mr Stephen Adu, in an interview with the Junior, explained that that special exercise should not be seen as a second round of placement which was usually done by the Computerised Schools Selection and Placement System (CUSPS).

He said currently some heads of schools had started declaring vacancies in their schools and, therefore, it was up to parents of candidates who had not been placed, to go to the junior high schools their children attended or contact the district and regional education offices for the list of schools with vacancies and make choices for their children.

Besides, candidates with special cases concerning the first placement would be attended to and re-placed in other schools where their scores fell in line with.

He mentioned some of the special cases as those with serious medical conditions, candidates whose parents had been transferred from the communities where they lived and those who entered wrong codes during the shading exercise.

Mr Adu cited an example of a qualified candidate who was accidentally placed at the School for the Blind, although that child is not visually impaired. This was due to wrong coding of the schools selected.

He implored parents and guardians to try and accept the schools where their children had been placed to make the CSSPS credible.

“Most parents want their children to be in the so-called big schools. This is quite frustrating, since such schools cannot absorb all candidates. There are other equally good schools out there,” he said.

He said after the mopping up exercise, heads of schools with vacancies would be given the chance to make additional placements, with the approval of the GES.

Out of the 173,315 BECE candidates who qualified for placement, 139,478, including 1,579 re-entry candidates, have been placed in SHS and technical schools, leaving 33,837 who are yet to be placed under the special mopping up exercise.

Story by Hadiza Billa Quansah