Parents advised not to pay bribe for SHS placement
The National Co-ordinator of the Computerised Schools Selection and Placement System (CSSPS), Mr George Atta-Boateng, has cautioned parents against the payment of money to individuals who claim they can influence officials of the secretariat to place Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) candidates into senior high schools of their choice.
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“Parents should not compromise because you cannot pay to manipulate the system since that is not possible,” he advised.
Mr Atta-Boateng, who was speaking to the Daily Graphic in an interview in Accra yesterday, asked parents and guardians to report any individual who collected money from them to influence the placement of their children, to the nearest police station.
He said the Ministry of Education and the Ghana Education Service (GES) had constituted a team to investigate allegations of parents bribing some individuals to influence the placement of their children.
Placement, done on merit
Mr Atta-Boateng said placement into senior high schools and technical institutes was done on merit and no one could bribe their way through the system.
He explained that once a candidate did well based on his/her raw scores, the person was guaranteed one of his or her four choices of schools, so there was no need to pay money to anybody, adding that the police had already been alerted to look out for people collecting money from parents and guardians under the pretext of securing their children or wards admission in second-cycle schools of their choice.
“This time round we display the scores of all the students on the schools’ noticeboards. So, if you do not get good grades and you try to use some other means to get a school when your raw scores do not qualify you for placement in that school, you would be exposed and rejected,” the national co-ordinator said.
He promised that this year’s placement exercise would be smooth.
2014 BECE
A total of 422,946 candidates, made up of 219,394 males and 194,854 females registered for this year’s BECE.
Some 2,758 candidates, representing 0.59 per cent of those who registered for the examination, did not write it.
The candidates who sat for the examination were from 12,562 schools and it was conducted at 1,431 centres throughout the country.
News conference
Meanwhile, the GES will hold a news conference today to announce the release of the first batch of placements and how candidates could check the schools they had been placed in.
The GES will, among others, also be expected to announce when form one students would report in school for the 2014/2015 academic year.