BECE-No candidate will miss chosen school, GES assures

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11-09-08

THE Ghana Education Service (GES) has assured Ghanaians that no qualified Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) candidate will be placed in a second-cycle school he/she did not choose under the Computerised Schools Selection and Placement System (CSSPS).
It said candidates would be placed on merit in schools they themselves had chosen.
The Director in charge of Basic and Secondary Education, Mr Stephen Adu, who gave the assurance in an interview with the Daily Graphic, said students should look out for the six choices of schools they had chosen when the placement was completed.
According to him, the placement exercise would be done once, hence the six options (schools) given to candidates to choose from, and urged the public to co-operate with the Service, since not all the candidates would get their first choice schools.
He said the Service would not entertain the situation whereby parents asked for a change of school after choosing a particular school, since that created a problem.
He said the CSSPS Secretariat was expected to complete the process of placing candidates in senior high schools and technical institutes today.
Mr Adu said after that there would be printing and packaging of the documents, which would take about 10 days, after which they would be dispatched to second-cycle schools and education directorates.
“Next week candidates can text to short codes that will be given to know where they have been placed. We are hoping that the hard copies of the placement would get to the schools from 21st September,” he said.
He said the GES was working on the development of a website through which the placement could be hosted for candidates to check which schools they were placed in.
Mr Adu urged parents and guardians to be patient, since placement would be done according to the information provided by candidates.
He said the GES was doing its best to place all the qualified candidates.
Under the placement exercise, a candidate is supposed to score not more than grade five in the four core subjects of English, Mathematics, Science and Social Studies, and not more than grade six in any other two subjects.
More than 62.1 per cent of candidates who wrote the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) this year qualified to enter senior high schools and technical institutes, according to the West African Examinations Council (WAEC).
The candidates, numbering 210,282, scored between aggregates six and 30, thus meeting the requirements for placement into second cycle schools.