Dozens of parents furious at GES for slow placement of wards in high school

Parents of prospective senior high school students have expressed fury at the slow placement of their wards in school since the CSSPS portal opened on Sunday by the GES.

Dozens of worried parents and students thronged the Black Star Square in Accra to report placement problems including missing names at allocated schools and placement at day schools when the student lives hours away from the school.

GhanaWeb visited the Black Star Square, one of the ten solution centres set up by the Ghana Education Service (GES) throughout the country, on Friday and saw dozens of parents and students at the entrance who claim the only person speaking to them is a police officer who is telling them to return on Monday.

“The portal said my ward was placed at Adisadel College [in Cape Coast]. When we went for the admission, his name was not there. We came here for our issue to be addressed and they said we should come on Monday. But the children are supposed to report to school on Monday," a parent said.

Another parent told GhanaWeb that, "we live at Akosombo and my 13-year-old boy was placed at Odogorno SHS as a day student. A school he did not even choose. How do they expect me to rent for a 13 year-old? How is he going to survive?"

When Ghanaweb tried to seek clarification from officials at the centre, a police officer at the entrance said the officials were not ready to speak to the media. But revealed that they were only addressing issues of students having aggregates between 6 and 11.

He added that those with aggregates of 12 upwards having issues with their placement will be addressed from Monday. Hence the reason for some people being asked to return on Monday.

The Computerised School Selections Placement System (CSSPS) placed 473,728 qualified candidates out of 490,000 in senior high schools across the country leaving behind 122,706 qualified candidates who were not placed because they had grade nine in either Mathematics or English Language.

The Head of the Public Relations Unit of the Ghana Education Service (GES), Cassandra Twum Ampofo, told the media that there were enough vacancies to be filled by all the candidates who qualified to enter the senior high schools, technical and vocational institutions but have not been placed.

She explained that they are required to go to the self-placement platform on the cssps.gov.gh or cssps.org to select their preferred school from a list of schools provided.

She also added that a total of 38,355 of the candidates who were disqualified because they got grade nine in Mathematics or English or both would be sponsored by the government to rewrite those papers and would not be required to pay for the resit.