The Ghana Education Service (GES) has extended the window of placement of 2017’s Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) candidates into Senior High Schools across the country.
This is after the Service discovered that over 100,000 qualified BECE candidates had still not been placed, 24 hours after the initial deadline expired.
The GES had initially given qualified BECE candidates 48 hours to select an available option, but the window provided fell on a holiday and a weekend. This prompted some protest from the likes of the Ghana National Education Campaign Coalition, which described as unreasonable the 48-hour ultimatum given by GES.
The candidates now have at least up to Tuesday, September 5 to complete the placement, pending a review.
“…for those who have not been placed in any of their for options, we are asking them to continue to select schools on Monday [September 4] and Tuesday [September 5]. By next week Tuesday, we will do our review to assess the situation and take the next decision,” the acting Director-General of the GES, Professor Kwesi Opoku-Amankwa in an interview with Citi News.
“By Monday and Tuesday, we are expecting that they will be able to purchase the card and then go online to either print their admission form or select a school.”
Prof. Opoku-Amankwa explained further that the GES could have placed the candidates in question itself “but this time around, we are giving them the option to do what we call self-placement.”
In all, 267, 327 candidates secured places in schools of their choice, while 150, 770 candidates could not be placed in a school of their choice.
A total number of 460,941 registered candidates qualified to be placed while a total of 36, 849 candidates were not placed because they scored a Grade 9 in either English or Mathematics.
