School heads warned -Against back-door admissions

Front Page Lead
01-10-09

THE Ministry of Education has issued a stern warning to parents and school heads to desist from seeking and offering senior high school (SHS) admissions outside the Computerised Schools Selection and Placement System (CSSPS).
The caution comes amidst rising anxiety among parents and their children over the fate of 200,642 eligible candidates for the 198,000 vacancies available in SHSs across the country.
Computerised selection of candidates who were successful in last April’s BECE was completed last week and the list is expected to be released to the various heads of schools on October 7.
Meanwhile, the annual ritual of frantic efforts by parents to secure places in prestige schools have begun in earnest, occasioning the warning from the ministry.
The Head of the Public Relations Unit of the Ministry of Education, Mr Paul Krampah, told the Daily Graphic that there would be strict monitoring after the placement exercise and that any head caught to have engaged in any admission outside the CSSPS would be sanctioned.
Reacting to the directive, the President of the Conference of Heads of Assisted Secondary Schools (CHASS), Mr Samuel Ofori-Adjei, said heads were aware that they were not supposed to admit students outside the placement system.
“That information is known and nobody does that. If any head does that, then the person does so illegally,” he said, and reminded his colleague heads to adhere to the directive.
He said it was during the first and second years of the placement exercise that heads were allowed to replace students who had failed to report to the schools they had been placed in.
Mr Ofori-Adjei said under that dispensation, the heads were then asked, after picking students to fill the vacancies, to inform the Secondary Education Division of the GES for the regularisation of the stay of the students in their schools.
Mr Krampah said the CSSPS had seen improvement after the teething problems it had when it was introduced in 2005.
Presently, he said, the problem of a boy being sent to a girls’ school or a girl being sent to a boys’ school was a thing of the past and that the failure of candidates to chose the right codes in the selection of schools had accounted for that problem, among other things.
Mr Krampah expressed concern over the attitude of parents who wanted only popular and known schools for their children and indicated that there were schools such Adeiso Presbyterian Senior High, the St James Seminary, among other not-so-popular schools, which were performing very well.
He, therefore, urged parents to accept the schools their children had been placed in, stressing that candidates would forfeit the places given to them if they failed to report to the schools they had been posted to.
“Candidates should accept the schools they have been placed in, as there will be no change of school,” he said.
Expressing his fraustration, an angry parent, Mr Kweku Atta, who did not understand why his child was not placed in any of her six choices, questioned the wisdom in the CSSPS putting the child in a school in a district far away from where she attended school.
He explained that while his daughter had chosen schools in the Ajumako-Enyan-Esiam District, she was placed in a school in the Awutu-Senya District.
“How do they expect the child to go to school?” he asked.
“My son is a victim of the 2009 computer placement. I was invited to the school to select schools for him, with the assistance of the school authorities who took me through the form before the selection of the schools. The computer placement came out with a school but that was not his choice. It was also outside the region that was selected on his sheet,” another parent, Kukua Longdon, said in a letter to the Daily Graphic.
Yet another parent, Prof S.E. Anku, for his part, said the selection process was frustrating many candidates and their parents.
“Under what conditions would a student not get posted to his/her first choice school,when that student got aggregate six in the required six subjects and a surplus of four ones in the other four subjects? In short, that student got 10 ones! Why should a student like this not get the first choice school?” he asked.
But Mr Krampah said the placement had been done on merit, with the raw scores of candidates being used, explaining that obtaining Grade 1 in all subjects (or 10 ones) did not mean that a candidate should get his/her first choice school by all means.
Mr Krampah said every year the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) had a range for the grading system of candidates and that the Grade 1 range could be between 75 and 100 per cent or 70 and 100 per cent.
For instance, he said, in the placement exercise, a candidate with Grade 1 with a score of 80 per cent would be placed ahead of a candidate with Grade 1 with a score of 70 per cent.
Apart from the above, he said, candidates’ programmes were also considered in the selection process.
Mr Krampah assured parents and their children that qualified candidates would be placed, adding that placement reports were to get to the schools on October 7.
First-year students are supposed to report for school between October 12 and 15, 2009.