The Coordinator of the Computerised School Selection and Placement System (CSSPS), Sherif Sulemana, has announced that, out of about 2100 available vacancies at the Aburi Girls’ and Achimota schools combined in the 2026 placement, over 36,000 candidates applied to the two schools as their preferred choice.
This means a total of about 34,000 who applied to the two schools will now have to compete for placement in other schools since there are no vacancies for them in the two schools
Speaking in a radio interview monitored by Graphic Online on Joy FM on Wednesday morning, Mr Sulemana said the figures mean thousands of candidates who selected the two schools as their preferred choices will have to compete for a limited number of places when the 2026 CSSPS results are released on Friday, September 4, 2026.
At Aburi Girls for example, he said there were 8,225 applications for about 800 places, while Achimota received about 28,000 applications for approximately 1,300 places.
He said the pressure on the two schools was even more pronounced among candidates with strong aggregate scores.
At Aburi Girls’, about 3,000 of the 8,225 applicants had aggregates between six and 12, competing for a portion of the 800 available places.
At Achimota, Mr Sulemana said 14,800 applicants had aggregates between six and 12, against about 1,300 declared vacancies.
“Those are the realities within which we operate, and we want the general public to understand,” he said.
Mr Sulemana explained that placement was not determined by aggregate scores alone.
He said candidates were first ranked nationally from the best aggregate to the weakest. Where candidates competing for the same school, programme and residential status had the same aggregate, their raw examination scores were used to break the tie.
Programme choices and boarding preferences were then matched against the places available at each school.
Mr Sulemana said a candidate with a weaker aggregate could still be placed ahead of another candidate if the candidate recorded higher raw scores when a tie was being broken.
He, therefore, advised candidates and parents not to base their expectations solely on aggregate scores.
He said the practice of publishing candidates’ raw scores from the outset, rather than using them internally to break ties, was something the CSSPS Secretariat might need to reconsider.
The Press Secretary and Spokesperson for the Ministry of Education, Hashmin Mohammed, said heads of schools also had a discretionary quota of about five per cent of declared vacancies.
