Late release of school placements must stop

2023 JHS graduates, their parents, and the entire nation are tired of waiting forever for the release of the 2023 school placements. It is rather unfortunate that the Ghana Education Service (GES) and the Ministry of Education (MoE) have not learned any lessons from their practise of releasing the school placement of BECE graduates so close to their reporting dates.

Late release of school placements must stop, let us be proactive

The late release of school placements must stop. This has been a practise that everyone expected to be silenced in 2023, but alas, it is going to happen again. Per the GES’ released calendar for 2023-2024, BECE graduates are to report to school on December 4th to start their enrollment processing.  Often, the late release of school placements lead to the postponement of reporting to school by a week.

The late release of school placements must stop because it creates additional but unwelcome pressure on parents, students, and other stakeholders. Parents and guardians will have to go to the school in which their wards have been placed and join long queues just to pick up their ward’s prospectus, among others, from the school management.

At the same time, they have to prepare their children for school and visit shops in the main markets to purchase items they are supposed to submit on the day the student finally reports to school for academic work.

These parents also have to juggle work and the activities mentioned above and ask for permission from their workplaces or leave their businesses to attend to all these additional responsibilities.

For students who will not be lucky enough to be placed automatically, using the self-placement module will pose challenges. The worst scenario will be for those who have to get their schools changed at the SHS secretariat, etc.

All these stress-packed situations must not be delayed; instead, releasing the school placements at least two weeks before the reporting date would always be the best and least proactive effort the GES would have to undertake to make the entire process less stressful.

Students are so tired of waiting for their placements. Parents are as anxious as their wards, as they do not know the fate of their children.

Parents who decide to, for instance, purchase items meant for boarding students and hope their wards will be placed in boarding schools now will only be taking a very uncalculated risk as most students in the 2023 BECE will end up being day students.

The GES and the Ministry of Education will have to devise better, smarter, and more advanced ways of going about the school placement release. Since some results are always withheld or scrutinised after the release of the results, the marking of the scripts needs to be started very early after the BECE each year. This will lead to the early release of results and give WAEC ample time to conduct its investigations of alleged or suspected examination malpractices to save us all the unwelcome anxious waiting moments with little or no information from the GES and MoE on the school placement release date.

At the time of this publication, the GES had yet to release the school placement checker cards for sale to students and parents. The portal for checking the placement was also not live.

READ: What is BECE 2023 CSSPS automatic placement for the second-cycle of schools?

All this adds to the stress parents and their families go through each year in anticipation of the release of school placements.

The late release of school placements must stop. Let us be proactive and get the timelines and systems into an efficient and effective mode.