Late arrival of SHS freshers — Chass unhappy
Heads of second cycle schools have expressed worry over the late arrival of first year students to begin the new academic year in the various senior high schools.
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They said the late arrival of the students had led to the reduction of the number of years the students would spend in school.
This situation, they explained, had resulted in SHS students spending six terms instead of nine terms for their three-year period of study in senior high school.
The umbrella body of the heads of schools, the Conference of Heads of Assisted Secondary Schools (CHASS) has, therefore, called on the Ghana Education Service (GES) to work on ensuring the early completion of the exercise by the Computerised School Selection and Placement System (CSSPS) after the release of the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) results.
The President of CHASS, Mr Samuel Ofori-Adjei, who made the call in an interview with the Junior Graphic, said the late arrival of the students in their various high schools had compelled the heads to adopt measures to ensure that they covered most of the syllabus.
Mr Ofori-Adjei noted that because first-year students did not report on time, the timetable now had 10 instead of eight periods a day to make up for the lost hours of instruction and study.
He suggested that the first-year students should be in school by the first week of September every academic year.
“We are now in the middle of November and some schools still do not have the total number of students,” he said.
Response from GES
In response to the issue raised by CHASS, a Deputy Director-General of the GES, Mr Stephen Adu, told the Junior Graphic that the GES had over the years been trying to improve upon the early completion of the placement of BECE graduates into SHSs and technical institutes.
This year, for instance, he said, had seen great improvement following the early release of the BECE results by the West Africa Examinations Council (WAEC) in July.
Previously, he said, some first-year students were reporting for school during the second term but that had now become a thing of the past.
“We are hoping to improve upon the time first-year students report to school as we move along,” he said, and asked the school heads to submit the suggestions they had to the GES so that together they could solve the problem.
