With this year’s school placement season, the public conversation over the whole exercise has reared its head again, particularly with parents thronging resolution centres to seek to change their child’s placement because of one dissatisfaction or the other while others frantically try to pull strings behind the scenes to get their ward’s placement changed.
According to the Ministry of Education, there was a total of 719,018 Senior High School (SHS) spaces available for placement this year, more than the 604,567 candidates who qualified to be placed.
Indeed, even if all the 623,072 candidates who sat this year’s BECE qualified to be placed, there was in theory more than enough space to accommodate them all.
The reality, however, presents a different picture that is hinged on the breakdown of public senior high schools per their category (A, B and C).
According to the ministry, 313,283 candidates selected Category A schools as their first choice, competing for the 76,417 spaces available in those schools.
For Category B, 176,614 candidates applied, with 250, 366 spaces available for grabs, while 123,577 candidates selected a Category C school as their first choice, against a total of 468,652 spaces available in that category of schools.
From this breakdown, the problem is immediately obvious.
There is fierce competition for our A schools, while there is a glut of spaces in the B and C schools as far as desirability was concerned.
Indeed in the C schools, interest as a first choice lay somewhere less than a third of the available spaces there.
The landscape is obviously skewed, and for understandable reasons.
Every rational parent wants the best for his or her child, and where the child has performed decently at the WASSCE, an A school is a legitimate expectation.
I disagree vehemently with those who think that children who feel disappointed at missing out on their first choice Category A school despite excellent results should simply hold up their chin and get on with the school where they have been placed.
For parents who naturally want the best for their children, the decision to pursue certain top schools is informed by some or all of these:
- Infrastructure and campus aesthetics
- Academic records (including visibility of alumni on prestigious university programmes)
- Quality of teacher supervision
-Discipline record
- History and traditions of the school
- Family traditions (my big bro/sis/parent went there)
- Whether it is a faith-based school (also related to discipline perception and traditions)
- The school being a single sex school (as many top faith-based schools are)
-Prospect of access to alumni network upon graduation for work, scholarship and other opportunities and career guidance/mentorship for students whilst on campus)
-Visibility of prominent alumni the schools boast of and celebrate loudly.
- Record on trophies ( NSMQ, Sports, Milo Championship, Sprite Basketball, Debate, etc.), which cements the school’s reputation
-Social media hype (including alumni homecoming celebrations)
Of course, getting into an A school does not guarantee success in life, but that does not invalidate a desire to get into those schools.
It is a legitimate and rational pursuit, which inspires many children to work hard towards the BECE.
Every child is entitled to a dream school, and where he or she has worked hard to obtain very good grades, they should have a decent stab at gaining admission to such a school.
Bold initiatives
This brings me to my fundamental point. If the demand for A schools (with very good grades) far outstrips spaces available, why not invest in these schools to expand access in order to accommodate as many students as possible that have performed very well and qualify to be in those schools?
Many of these schools, including my alma mater Opoku Ware School, have vast lands that can accommodate almost twice the current infrastructure. This would mean employing more staff (teaching and non-teaching) as well as investing in other resources to make these schools ‘mega schools’ and in the process ensure a decent student-to-faculty ratio to preserve academic and discipline standards.
Indeed, whatever its issues, the double-track system managed to expand access to our senior high schools both in the Category A and some Category B schools where demand for spaces was high.
It should be possible, with the right investment, to go single-track and still expand access to these A schools.
Of course, this is not to mean that all A schools can admit everyone who chooses to go there.
The law of elasticity will always apply no matter the physical expansion in these schools.
No top school at any level anywhere in the world is able to admit all who desire to go there, including those with good grades, and in any case, not all schools have the physical capacity to expand.
But that does not mean we cannot and must not improve access to these schools where we can to accommodate as many as we can.
Our C schools
An unfortunate but bitter truth is that most of our Category C schools in particular are simply conveyor belts even if they manage to produce a few diamonds here and there.
These diamonds do not redeem their schools no matter how much we celebrate them for their achievements.
The other truth is that many of the children in these schools enter with rather weak grades and mostly from deprived backgrounds at the public junior high school level.
The fact that our society elites, including the very managers of our education system will move heaven and earth to avoid their children being placed in these schools says a lot.
I believe that we must be emphatic and serious about the necessary interventions, both physical and otherwise, to ensure that progression to tertiary education from a Category C school is feasible in a basic way that applies to most of our Category A and B schools.
Beyond infrastructural interventions, academic remedial interventions are desperately needed in these schools to ensure they are adequately prepared for their WASSCE to give them a good chance at tertiary education.
Just as it is possible to walk and chew gum at the same time, it should be possible to expand access to our A schools and at the same time make it possible for a child in a C school to obtain a decent standard of quality education.
For as long as the A schools remain what they are and the C schools remain what they are, we can expect an annual ritual of this mad scramble tinged with frustration whenever the placement season is upon us.
The status quo will not simply redeem itself. Only bold, meaningful interventions will.
Rodney Nkrumah-Boateng
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