Deal with school placement challenges once and for all

Some frustrated parents are reported to have besieged the premises of the Education Ministry in Accra to seek placement for their children following the challenges that have plagued the exercise.

Candidates who sat for this year’s Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) and passed expected to be placed in one of their four schools of choice, but some of them were left out of the initial placement exercise.

A second window was opened for such candidates over the weekend, when the Ghana Education Service gave them up to yesterday and extended it to tomorrow to enable them to undergo an online placement process to select schools of their choice from a given list of schools.

The exercise, however, turned out to be a frustrating experience for some of the candidates and their parents, some of whom besieged the Ministry of Education to express their dissatisfaction with the process.

The government says it is working to overcome the Internet-based challenges that have plagued the Computerised Schools Selection and Placement System (CSSPS) this year.

The Daily Graphic understands and shares in the frustration and despair that parents and guardians are going through to get school placement for their children and wards and pleads for calm while the authorities sort out the challenges with the server system.

Be that as it may, we are saddened by the fact that in this advanced age of technology, challenges with computerised selection and placement continue to plague us and we are at our wits’ ends trying to resolve the bottlenecks.

Even the manual selection system, though cumbersome, did not create the frustration that parents and their children are facing presently.

This is highly unacceptable because these setbacks could negatively impact the educational calendar of the free SHS policy.

A cursory assessment shows that the challenges being experienced border on traffic volumes because of the huge number of people who want to access information on site, which the system is not able to support.

The Daily Graphic suggests to the authorities to create multiple access points for the candidates and their parents to get information through different routes.

Alternatively, the candidates should be able to check their school placement on mobile phones before the final placement by the Ghana Education Service and the CSSPS Secretariat.

We believe that these measures, if implemented, will go a long way to solve the perennial problems that parents go through to get placement for their children.

The nation cannot continue talking about the same problem every year without a bold and lasting solution to this annual ritual.

Education is the bedrock of our development process and everything should be done to make it accessible and equitable at all times.