Why GES, MoE can’t dance to SHS “Dis” Placement mess

While the Ghana Education Service continues to show clearly its inability and capacity to manage the school placement, the Ministry of Education is chocked and cannot respond to the overwhelming pressure and questions from the public. The Minister of Education is even running away from questions. The centre cannot hold.

Prospective SHS students from across the country and their parents throng the Independence Square in Accra Monday to have their issues resolved.

GES’s Shambolic Self Placement System: Very annoying and disgusting 

Problems associated with the computerized school selection and placement system caused thousands of desperate school placements to be lost on the 9^th and 11^th September 2019.

The first sign of this challenged school placement system was malfunctioning school selection software released by the GES prior to the BECE.

Challenges school placement

Today, the challenges facing the infamous school placement include but not limited to

1. Wrongful placement of students.
2. Rearrangement of schools selected by candidates. For example Accra Girls’’ is indicated as option three for a candidate when the school is in option A. Such a school is not in category C and hence can never be in slot 3 or 4 on a candidate’s school choice sheet. But that was the case for some candidates. Is the system been manipulated to deny students a good placement.
3. Cancellation of placements done by students and parents has caused more stress and worry. It has also made many suffer for the inefficiency of the school placement system.

After several years of using the school placement system, we have failed as a nation to perfect the school placement system. We have rather created the worse system ever in the history of Ghana’s Education System.

The challenges facing the placement of students into senior high schools across the country cannot be solved if the MOE and GES does not free itself from this perennial incremental problem and become proactive.

Newsghana24.com provides some workable suggestion in the article GES’s Shambolic Self Placement System: Very annoying and disgusting  is worth reading on how to solve the current problems.

School Placement System: Was it Sole sourced?

The Ghana Education Service switched from the previous school selection system to a new one for the 2019 School placement.

We need to know which company was contracted to install and provide the needed IT services for the new school placement portal. Was it single sourced? We hope it was not.

Because that will be the starting point of the challenges facing the placement system. If it went through competitive bidding that will mean some level of fare playing ground which will help us choose the most efficient system that is cost effective.

Anything shot of this is danger. However, there are factors that need to be considered if the procurement needs to be sole sourced.