427,950 Vacancies declared in SHSs

Four hundred and twenty-seven thousand, nine hundred and fifty vacancies have been declared by public and private senior high schools and technical institutes for placement of this year’s Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) candidates under the Computerised Schools Selection and Placement System (CSSPS).

Out of the about 618 public SHSs, 582 schools have declared 396,721 vacancies while 22 out of the 23 public technical institutes have declared 11,184 vacancies. In addition, 40 private SHSs out the 171 approved SHSs have declared 20,045 vacancies, as of September 10, 2015.

“The collation of vacancies in schools is on-going and the number will go up. With the inauguration of any of the community day SHSs, the figure would go up further,” the outgoing National Coordinator of the CSSPS, Mr George Atta-Boateng, told the Junior Graphic.

A total of 438,047 candidates wrote the 2015 BECE across the country. The number of candidates represent an increase of 15,084 over last year’s figure of 422,946 final-year junior high school (JHS) students who registered for the examination.

With all the SHSs and TIs yet to declare their full vacancies, it means that there would be more vacancies to cater for all the candidates that sat the 2015 BECE as well as  the re-entry candidates.

In the course of this year’s examination, five papers: English Language 2, Religious and Moral Education 2, Integrated Science 2, Social Studies 2 and Mathematics 2 leaked, compelling the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) to cancel them for the candidates to rewrite those subjects.

...Private BECE candidates to get placement

The Computerised Schools Selection and Placement System (CSSPS) will place some of the 1,181 candidates who sat for the private Basic Education Certificate Examination BECE) this year, the outgoing National Coordinator of the CSSPS, Mr George Atta-Boateng, has said.

According to him, “all of this has been factored in our placement exercise this year.”

The secretariat, he told the Junior Graphic, had completed the validation of data of candidates to cross check for errors and make corrections to them. “The validation of data of candidates include checking for programme errors, where candidates chose programmes that do not exist in certain schools; as well as gender errors to ensure that males were not sent to female schools and vice versa.

“We have gone through all the 438,047 candidates to check for errors and we have done all the corrections. Some of the schools have even written to us to correct errors on the forms of some of their candidates,” he said.

Regarding the directive to candidates to text and check their schools, Mr Atta-Boateng said the exercise had been fruitful, and it was based on that directive that some schools detected errors in the selection made by candidates.

Asked when this year’s placement would be done, he said the secretariat was waiting for WAEC to release all the results of the candidates before it would begin the placement process.

He said the secretariat would not do the placement while some results were still being investigated, “because assuming you do the placement of results released and then later other better results are released, what do you do?”

“Until WAEC releases all the results of the candidates, we cannot do the placement because if you do that and later withheld results are released and those ones are better than some of the first batch of results, you wouldn’t know what to do,” he stated.