Over 90% of 2023 school placement complaints resolved – Secretariat
Nana Afrah Sika Mensah, the Deputy Coordinator of the Free Senior High School, says the Secretariat has resolved more than 90 percent of complaints received since the commencement of this year’s Senior High School (SHS) placement process.
Nana Mensah, in an interview with the Ghana News Agency (GNA) on the ongoing placement in Accra, said the resolution centre had received over 10,000 cases and resolved over 90 per cent of the issues.
She said the process had been successful as expected, saying: “We are making a lot of progress since we started addressing the issues on February 16, and the number of parents and students trooping to the Centre has reduced drastically,” she said.
Nana Mensah said the Secretariat was working on issues related to change of school, change of programme, self-placement, change of residential status, and others.
She said the Secretariat was hoping to fix every student on the system by the end of the week, adding that the major cases they were dealing with were students who had been placed but wanted changes due to location and those who had not been placed at all.
“Our focus now is to attend to those who have not been placed before attending to those who have been placed and want changes depending on the availability of spaces in the schools,” she said.
Nana Mensah said even though some parents and guardians continued to visit the Centre, it was mainly because their contacts were not reliable to keep them informed about the resolution of their wards’ concerns.
She said some students had failed to come with their “real” parents and advised parents to accompany their wards to the Centre themselves and not through intermediaries.
“Another challenge we are facing is students with poorer grades wanting to be placed in first-class schools. We have advised them not to select category “A” and “B” schools because they are filled.”
The long queues that characterised the placement processes during the first day have reduced, with officials collecting contacts and other relevant details from parents and guardians to address their issues, the GNA observed.
A total of 538,399 students qualified for this year’s CSSPS in Senior High and Technical and Vocational Schools out of the 547, 329 candidates who sat for the 2022 Basic Education Certificate Examinations.
A total of 372,780 students have been automatically placed in one of their school choices, while 165, 619 candidates, who could not be matched with any of their choices, asked to do self-placement to select from available schools.
The Computerized School Selection and Placement System became operational in September 2005 to address challenges from the manual system of selection and placement.
The system places students transiting from the Junior High Schools to Senior High Schools, Senior High Technical Schools and Technical and Vocational Institutes.
Source: GNA