CSSPS is here at last!
The announcement by the Ghana Education Service (GES) that this year’s school placement will be out tomorrow, Sunday, February 21, 2021, is surely good news to parents, the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) candidates and other stakeholders.
Over the last weeks there has been growing anxiety over the seeming delay in the placement exercise, particularly so when the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) had released the results for over two months now.
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We hope this announcement will go a long way to assuage the anxiety and pressure that was mounting on parents, which gave rogue website operators the opportunity to peddle fake news.
It has been the norm that every year when the results of the BECE were released by the WAEC, the next thing had been the placement exercise under the Computerised School Selection and Placement System (CSSPS).
Over the years the placement exercise had been done within a maximum of one month after the release of the results.
In 2019, for instance, the WAEC released the BECE results on August 29, 2019 and by mid-September 2019 the placement had began.
However, this year’s placement exercise has taken some time to be effected after the results were released in December 2020, which got some parents worried.
Thankfully, the exercise begins this Sunday and we expect that it will be smooth and seamless, particularly when the GES has undertaken a number of measures, including a month-long sensitisation programme on how to select schools and what to take into consideration in choosing a school.
Furthermore, the GES gave the candidates and their parents over a month to do adequate consultations, checks and cross checks before settling on the schools they preferred.
We urge the GES to be firm, principled and resist any attempt of parents who come up with excuses, requesting a change. Admittedly, technical challenges such as a male student selecting an all-female school and the selection of a day school, which is unreasonably far away from the place the student resides, should be attended to.
Beyond these challenges, parents must support the system to work by accepting wherever their children have been placed, once the school is among the schools the candidate selected during the registration.
What parents must know is that this year's academic calendar is very stretched, and any further delay at home will affect particularly the child, and so all must cooperate with the GES to make the calendar work.
Let’s remain calm as the exercise begins tomorrow.