2025 School Placement: Reasons why many 2025 BECE graduates will miss 1st and 2nd Choices

Many 2025 BECE graduates will miss the 1st and 2nd choice schools they chose during the school selection. Do you know why, and do you want to find out the facts ahead of the release of the 2025 BECE results and school placements? If your answer is yes, then keep reading.

The 2025 school placements are expected to be released before the end of October 2025, but many 2025 BECE graduates will miss 1st and 2nd choice because either parents, schools, teachers, or the candidates made avoidable mistakes during the school selection phase.

The Education-News Consult, in an attempt to help schools and parents whose wards will be writing the 2026 BECE, has released its new BECE SmartPick Predictor, a simple yet effective software for predicting the categories from which schools should be chosen for BECE candidates. This uses data science and AI to help you make informed choices. Check this out here >>> Avoid 2026 BECE Critical Mistakes: Choose BECE SmartPick Tracker

The mistakes that will lead to many of the JHS graduates missing their first and second school choices are as follows.

Schools were chosen based on taste and preference

Many students made choices during the school selection phase using their tastes and preferences instead of using their academic strengths. Sadly, parents of most of the BECE graduates encouraged this mistake by also choosing schools their wards would never qualify for. By just using the grades the candidate obtains from the school mocks, parents would notice that their wards are not making aggregates between 06 and 10.

The question is, why do you choose a category? A school like PRESSEC Legon, Aburi Girls, Achimota SHS, and the like when your ward does not even make aggregate 13 in the school mocks?

Now that the results are out, and you chose a category A school but scored a poor grade, the reality is here, and the truth is that you will not be placed in a category A school with the bad grade you got. You cannot compete with the students who made 6, 7, 8, and even 9 ones who also chose the same school. You should have started choosing your schools from category B, but you never did that because you had an eye for big things, but academically you were not fit for such schools.

Programme Choice that demands better aggregates to top schools

In some instances, the programme choice you make demands better aggregates if you are to be placed. For instance, students who want to learn science or be general science students must be able to make very excellent grades in science and mathematics. However, when your grades in these subjects are not the best, you cannot compete for the available slots in a given school. Other students are competing for the same placement with grade 1 or 2 in integrated science and mathematics; hence, you face the possibility of missing placement in the Category A or B school.

READ: 2025 SHS Placement: It will be easy to be placed in a Day than Boarding School

Accommodation Choice

During the school placement, this is what happens. After a student has made the needed raw score for a particular school and programme of choice, he or she will not be placed in the school until there is an available place for him or her based on the accommodation choice.

Most BECE graduates want to be in boarding school; hence, nearly every one of them chooses boarding for every school they want to attend. Let us assume that you want to study general science in Achimota. If you have the needed raw score for Achimota, but the school has already got the number of students it can take for boarding, even if the school has 100 slots for day students, you will not be placed in Achimota simply because your accommodation choice does not match what is on your school selection for Achimota.

What this simply means is that many students are also going to miss placement, all because they chose boarding school. This explains why sometimes a student with a good grade who wants to gain admission into, let’s say, PRESEC Legon will not be placed, but another student may choose the same school and opt for day and be placed.

READ: Government told to charge GH¢10,000 for Category A school placements

Oversubscription for a given school

Finally, students will often miss their first and second school choices because these schools are very competitive and almost all students choose these schools. For instance, some category A and B schools can admit not more than 800 SHS1 students, but the number of students that choose such schools is often more than 3000. What this means is that 2200 out of the 3000 who chose the school to be considered for the 2025 school placement will never get the chance to be placed in such a school because the school does not have the capacity to admit even half of those who chose the school.

READ: School placement For Sale: Systems breach and human interference must stop

The above are very clear and explain why many 2025 BECE graduates will miss 1st and 2nd choice during the 2025 school placement.

Avoid wrong and poorly determined school selection for 2026 BECE candidates. Check this out here >>> Avoid 2026 BECE Critical Mistakes: Choose BECE SmartPick Tracker Software