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The Computerized School Selection and Placement (CSSPS) which has rendered many parents and their children traumatized in search of secondary schools has been explained by the Minister of Education, Hon. Dr. Matthew Opoku Prempeh that the system for the placement was violated by unknown people.

According to him, there was a report on the 10th of September 2019 from the heads of certain category-A schools that the numbers of students who are self-placing are going above the number of students who have been added to the automatic placement that the schools could contain.

Addressing the media at the Ministry of Information conference room, Dr. Opoku Prempeh asserted that “every school has a sealing number before we started the placement and so these schools were calling back to tell us the challenges they were going through. We started investigations and we realised that there was something wrong and so we closed down the self-placement model because we couldn’t allow it to continue”.

He disclosed that about 122,706 students, constituting 25.9 percent of the students underwent the self-placement to change their schools with existing available vacancies depending on the grade they have.

He mentioned that the investigation also exposed the difference in the original self-placement print outs and that of the fake self-placement print outs as the latter lacked certain features like the enrolment date and the tracking system on them.

Touching on the notion that the private Junior High Schools are more than the public schools in the placement, the Education Minister debunked it with statistics that “the number of public schools that have candidates coming up is 10, 635; 63 percent of all JHS are public schools students who chance in the secondary schools as compared with 37 percent from the private schools”.

“It is never true that there are more private students than public students. The number of public school students was 388, 374 (75.8%) of the total number of students were public school students. Private schools were 24.2%”, he mentioned.

He indicated that for the entire Category-A schools, the government has reserved 30 percent placement for students from the public schools under its program called “Public School Equity” and thus, given the remaining 70 percent of the places for the best schools to compete.

“So, the 30% public equity is for the Category-A schools and they are 55 in number and this has always been so before this government came into office. Previously, we were in a system under a terminology called ‘Catchment Area Protocol’ and so it was meant for those who live in the vicinity of the catchment area of the Category-A schools to choose to go to those schools. We expanded the catchment area to be available to all students of public schools around the country for equity purposes”, he announced.