GES Clears the air on alleged scrapping of BECE for JHS

The Ghana Education Service today debunked news making rounds that, the service has canceled the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE). The BECE is currently the only national examination used to help place Basic School graduates into Senior High Schools to study at the SHS.

According to the Director-General during the press conference organized today, the news the BECE has been scrapped is false.  According to him, the JHS curriculum is yet to be reviewed. This implies until the Ghana Education Service has reviewed the Junior High School Syllabus, it will be premature to take such a decision.

The cancellation from all indication has to be thoroughly examined and better ways of progression from JHS to SHS identified before any such moves can be deemed necessary.

In a related development, the GES also cleared the air on the re-opening day for both Basic and Secondary schools across the country. According to the service, the public basic schools will re-open 2019/2020 academic year on 3^rd September while private schools will reopen on September 10, 2019, for the 2019-2020 academic year.

SHS 3 students of the Senior High Schools are re-opening on August 19th, 2019. According to the GES, this is to enable schools to run the Academic Intervention for 4 weeks to make-up for 5 weeks that will be lost due to WASSCE Exams.

The GES indicated that teachers will be compensated for the extra work this new plan has necessitated to ensure the students have ample time for preparation ahead of the WASSCE in 2020.

The Director-General also added that early morning preps and Saturdays lessons may have to be instituted to help achieve the best reult come WASSCE 2020 in April.

One critical issue that was not touched extnesively was, the availability of text books for the news syllabus before school commences in September 2019.