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Mr Mark Sasu-Mensah, the National Coordinator of the CSSPS
Mr Mark Sasu-Mensah, the National Coordinator of the CSSPS

CSSPS to set up call centre to address complaints of BECE candidates

The Computerised School Selection and Placement System (CSSPS) Secretariat is to set up a call centre to receive complaints of parents and students during the placement of Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) candidates into senior high schools (SHSs) and technical institutes (TIs) this year.

This is to address the anxiety of parents and candidates, as well as prevent the crowding at the Ghana Education Service (GES) and the CSSPS Secretariat during the release of the placement lists.

The new National Coordinator of the CSSPS, Mr Mark Sasu-Mensah, who made this known to the Daily Graphic, noted that as a customer service organisation, “our customers must be satisfied with what we do. They need to understand what is happening here. When they have a problem, they must have somebody to talk to to address their problem”.

Public information

In the course of the placement exercise, Mr Sasu-Mensah said, parents and guardians would need information, especially when their candidates missed out on their choice of schools as a result of competition with regard to the schools they chose.

“For instance, if you check your placement on phone and you are not getting any results, there should be someone to tell you why you are not able to get your results at that particular time,” he pointed out.

Mr Sasu-Mensah indicated that people who called the call centre would be given codes to come to the office personally for their issues to be addressed to put their minds at ease.

“There are a lot of anxieties when the placement results are released, and we want people to be calm during this period,” he stated.

He said shortly after assuming office, he commissioned some of his staff to go out to the field with questionnaires on the placements, indicating that, “this has given me an idea of the problems people have with the process.”

The concerns of the public, he said, had been looked at, adding: “One thing that ran through the issues was lack of understanding of the placement processes, right from the selection of schools to the placement itself.

Transparency

The national coordinator gave the assurance that the placement exercise for this year and beyond would be free, fair and transparent to ensure that everybody was happy about the schools their wards had been placed in.

“I want to do a free, fair and transparent placement exercise this year and beyond. This will make everybody accept his or her placements,” he said and commended the past national coordinators for the work they had done to improve the system.

Mr Sasu-Mensah, who is also an educationist, pledged to work hard with the introduction of new initiatives to further improve the system for the smooth placements of BECE candidates across the country.

Among other things, he said, he wanted to address technical hitches that came with the system when placements were done, adding that in pursuit of that, he had gone to the National Information and Technology Agency (NITA) to get their support in addressing those technical hitches.

One of those technical hitches, he said, was the inability of candidates to acess information when they texted to check their schools.

He noted that he would also meet the heads of second cycle institutions to ensure the smooth placements of BECE candidates.

Mr Sasu-Mensah is a product of the St Peter's Senior High School, the SDA College of Education, University of Ghana and the University of Cape Coast.

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