Placement Of BECE Candidates Next Month

The Ghana Education Service (GES) will complete the placement of qualified Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) candidates into senior high schools and technical institutes on September 4, 2012. The first batch of candidates who opted for the 30 per cent quota exercise which is under the Computerised Schools Selection and Placement System (CSSPS) will be placed on September 1, 2012, while the second batch comprising the remaining 70 per cent of candidates will be placed on September 4, 2012. A Deputy Director General of the Ghana Education Service (GES), Mr Stephen Adu, who made this known to the Daily Graphic,said, �we are expecting that schools will reopen by September 17 tentatively if everything goes well�. According to him, the GES had taken delivery of the raw scores of candidates from the West Africa Examinations Council (WAEC) and had begun the process of placements. �We want to assure parents that we have learnt from our mistakes in the past,� he said, adding that the biggest challenge last year was with the 30 per cent quota. Mr Adu expressed the hope that this year�s placement would be smoother than last year�s. He urged parents to accept the schools their children would be sent to since the candidates would be placed according to the choices they made. The education authorities, he said, were trying to develop other schools, and that parents would have to help in that cause. He said the government, GES and teachers were doing their part, and that it was incumbent on parents to also assist. Mr Adu said students from less endowed schools were doing well and cited the Mankessim Senior High Technical School, which won the Conference of Heads of Assisted Secondary Schools (CHASS) 50th anniversary quiz competition. WAEC released this year�s BECE results last month. One hundred and eighty of the candidates had their results cancelled for various examination malpractices. The council also indicated that the results of 5,000 candidates were being held pending investigations. A total of 376,859 candidates from 11,164 public and private junior high schools across the country wrote this year�s BECE. The candidates represented a 4,033 increase over last year�s figure of 372,826. In all, 203,394 males and 173,465 females sat for the one-week examination, which would produce the second batch of third-year students for senior high school since the change of government in 2009.