Parents can’t prepare well if 2021 School Placements are delayed

• Parents can’t prepare well if 2021 school placements are released late.
• The government has been advised to exempt students placed in the category A schools from Free SHS.
• If the 2021 School Placement overly delayed given that students would report to school on 4th April 2022?

While 2021 BECE candidates and their parents are anxiously waiting for the release of the 2021 BECE School Placement, the GES is taking its time to ensure everything is set before it releases the placements.

However, the issue of concern is parents can’t prepare well if school placements are released late or so close to the date for reopening which is 4th April 2022.

Parents and students as key stakeholders need at least 14 days to prepare adequately for school. Preparing for the school includes visiting the school the child has been placed in and taking the School Prospectus. Parents need to know whether their wards would be attending school as boarding or day students so as to buy the relevant items for school.

Very often if the GES delays in the release of the school placement, the reopening day of SHS1 students is postponed by at least one week. Should this happen, SHS one students may be required to report to school on 11th April 2022.

Although the release of the 2021 School Placement seems to have been delayed, there is still ample time and the GES may release the school placement between Friday 18th March and Wednesday 23rd March 2022.

The Ghana Education Service had earlier disclosed that it was going to release the school placements from 14th March 2021 but at the time of publishing this story, the placements were yet to be published on the CSPSS portal

Let students who gain admission into Category A schools pay full fees – Prof Adei

In a related development, Prof Stephen Adei believes it is now important that students admitted to Catagory A Schools pay fees.

As the country struggles to deal with its financial challenges, many top officials in the ruling government are calling on the government to allow parents of students admitted into Free SHS to pay tuition fees instead of the government making it entirely free.

One of such calls came from Prof. Stephen Adei, the former Rector of GIMPA. According to him, it is time for Nana Akuffo Addo to exempt ‘Category A’ SHS students from Free SHS.

This means that once you gain admission into any of the schools rated as “A” schools, you must pay fees. This will reduce the investments government continues to make under the Free SHS policy, which is in its 5th Year and has graduated batches of students who sat for the 2020 and 2021 WASSCE.

He made his position known on JoyNews on the Free SHS which is currently A-Free-for-all policy indicating that if the government decided not to fund the fees and all related expenses of students admitted into category A schools, the savings can be used to improve the facilities in the community secondary schools which need improvements of different levels.

Read: Release our 2021 CSSPS School Placements, we’re stressed up -Students

He suggested such schools should be made autonomous and students made to pay fees. Others including Hon. Kennedy Osei Nyarko believes that policies to be abolished should include Free SHS, school feeding program, trainees allowance, and NABCO.

READ: GES gives deadline to open 2021 BECE school placement portal

Whether the central government will consider these suggestions or not is yet to be known. Readers will recall that the 2020 school placements came with several agitations and parents suggested that they would prefer to pay fees instead of their wards spending more days at home during the vacation.

Source: Ghanaeducation.org