The Executive Director of education think tank, Africa Education Watch, Kofi Asare has said, in a bid to resolve issues regarding senior high school placements, government should allow junior high school graduates to select their school of choice after the Basic Education Certification Examination (BECE) results are released.

Mr. Asare said such a move will help eliminate instances where potential senior high school students are denied admission to Category A or B schools by the computerised placement system because they failed to get the required grades to merit being admitted to such schools.

He said there will also be less queues at placement resolution centres if his suggestion is adopted.

Speaking on the February 18 edition of The Big Issue on Citi TV/Citi FM, Mr. Asare said: “the computer will respect that you may have been outperformed by other qualified graduates depending on the results that the BECE produces so that is why you will always have an average of 30 percent of BECE graduates that have to go through self-placement.”

He added that “if students have an idea of their BECE results before selecting their schools, it will significantly, if not totally eliminate the issue of self-placement because, by the time you are selecting a particular school, you should be aware of the cut-off point, both by an aggregate or by raw scores so that you don’t get close to schools you know you don’t qualify for.”

A lot of parents rushed to the GNAT Hall at Adabraka on Thursday, February 16 and when the GES opened a challenge center to address all outstanding issues with the 2022/2023 SHS placement.

Many complained that their wards had performed well but were not placed in any of their selected schools.

Mr. Asare said, “the only way to avoid that is to have the BECE results released before the selection of senior high schools and because the graduate has seen his results, he will know which schools he qualifies to select.”