More than half not qualified in the placement of BECE candidates

More than half of the candidates who wrote the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) this year failed to qualify for admission to senior high schools (SHSs) and technical institutes (TIs).

This is because they failed to meet the placement criteria set under the Computerised Schools Selection and Placement System (CSSPS).

For a candidate to qualify for selection and placement into an SHS or TI, he/she is required to score between aggregates six and 30.

According to statistics made available to the Daily Graphic by the National Co-ordinator of the CSSPS, Mr Samuel Oppong, 176,128 candidates, representing 46.93 per cent of the 375,280 candidates who sat for the 2011 BECE, met the criteria for selection and placement into SHSs and TIs.

This implies that 53.07 per cent of the candidates failed to meet the criteria for placement.

However, the GES said failure to meet the criteria for selection into SHSs and TIs did not mean that the candidates had failed the BECE, since the examination was both terminal and continuous.

Last year, 172,359 out of 350,888 candidates who wrote the BECE qualified for placement into SHSs and TIs. The figure represented about 49 per cent of the number of candidates.

Mr Oppong indicated that 177,000 vacancies had been declared by heads of SHSs and TIs this year and, therefore, there were more vacancies for the qualified candidates.

However, he said 52 SHSs had been over-subscribed by candidates, meaning that competition for placement into those schools had been very stiff.

For instance, he said, while 300 vacancies had been declared at the Wesley Girls’ High School in Cape Coast, 12,400 qualified candidates had selected the school as their first choice, adding that “these qualified candidates have good raw scores but because of the available vacancies, they will not be able to get the school for their first choice”.

“Some of them have raw scores as high over 400,” he emphasised, adding that “these are excellent grades”.

The GES has, meanwhile, completed the placement of 70 per cent of qualified candidates who wrote this year’s BECE into SHSs and TIs.

It said candidates could text their index numbers and year of writing the BECE to short code 1060 to any mobile network to access their schools of choice, adding that placement for the remaining 30 per cent of qualified candidates would be done by October 7, 2011.

The 30 per cent is meant for candidates who are to benefit from the quota policy to place them in SHSs within a 10-mile radius of where the candidates live.

Two weeks ago the service sent out forms for candidates interested in the quota policy to pick schools in their localities and then submit the forms to the service for placement.

President J.E.A. Mills, in his State of the Nation Address this year, announced that the policy to select 30 per cent of first-year SHS students from within a 10-mile radius of where the schools were situated was to be restored from the 2011-2012 academic year.

That, he said, was because the government had noted with concern the rate at which the computerised placement mechanism was blocking access to second- cycle education for pupils from basic schools in their catchment areas.

The Head of the Public Relations Unit of the GES, Mr Charles Parker-Allotey, told the Daily Graphic that “from October 10, 2011 all candidates can get their admission forms from the Internet through the use of the scratch cards being sold”.

The placement, he said, had been done in a transparent and fair manner and indicated that it was done on merit according to the choices made by the candidates themselves.

“Our problem is that parents are insisting on their children’s first-choice schools; otherwise there should not be any problem,” he said.

Mr Parker-Allotey, therefore, appealed to parents, guardians and the public at large to accept the schools their children and wards had been placed in, since those schools were part of the choices they (the candidates) had made in the selection of schools.

Candidates with problems, he said, could call the GES hotline on 0302-683666 for redress.

The CSSPS, which replaced the manual system of selection and placement into SHSs, is now in its seventh year of operation. It takes into consideration three categories of candidates, namely, existing year’s qualified candidates, re-entry candidates (those who sat the BECE last three years) and then foreign candidates.

About two weeks ago, the GES advised parents, guardians and the public to desist from mounting pressure on GES officials for their children and wards to be admitted to their first-choice schools.

Government functionaries, it said, were also entreated not to put pressure on school heads for admissions.

Source: Daily Graphic