Public Relations Officer for the Ministry of Education, Kwasi Kwarteng, has revealed that over 94% of BECE candidates have been placed in second cycle institutions.
Providing an update on the number of students placed in their respective schools, Mr Kwarteng indicated that the challenge which may now confront the ministry has to do with students that may have been placed but not necessarily “enrolled”. That notwithstanding, he explained that the ministry is convinced that all students placed in second cycle institutions will be enrolled.
“If you look at the automatic placement and self-placement currently, over 94% of students have been placed. We are left with around 6% that have not been placed…”
Kwasi Kwarteng
Mr Kwarteng noted that a lot of the schools are currently undertaking manual enrolments which is not recorded on the ministry’s platform. He noted that these could be candidates who probably have not checked their results, neither have they checked their placements. Owing to this, Mr Kwarteng expressed that the Ministry has directed schools who engaged in manual placements to make necessary information available to the ministry to track the numbers.
“But as I speak, we have an enrolment drive policy that we are implementing to make sure that if not all the 100% that were eligible for placement enrols, we will have close to 100%”.
Kwasi Kwarteng
School placement process
Commenting on the school placement process so far, Mr Kwarteng revealed that the process has been “satisfactory”, albeit there’s still room for much more improvement. He opined that considering the entire process from the selection to the placement, there’s been some “significant interventions” made to ensure the whole placement is successful, despite some challenges encountered.
“For instance, you cannot decouple the selection process from the placement process. Initially, you will require students or candidates to select some choices of schools that they want. This time round, the minister said to give more opportunities to students, so that you wouldn’t have situations of ‘I was not placed’ in a school.
Kwasi Kwarteng
To achieve the successful placement of students, Mr Kwarteng revealed that the category of choices of schools for students were divided into three to enable eligible candidates select six schools. He explained that out of these six schools, category A schools allows the selection of one school, whereas category B schools allows candidates to choose two schools, with the remaining number of selctions, falling under category C. The PRO for the Education Ministry, however, emphasized that one of the schools selected by candidates must be a “compulsory day school” within their catchment area.
Mr Kwarteng revealed that following the selection process, the sector minister undertook a “novel” initiative to avert the possibility of students not being placed in schools.
“He sent back all the selections that the candidates made to their individual phones and their numbers through a process called text for confirmation. So, I just require to approve or validate all the schools that you selected, so that whether there are any errors or where there have to be genuine concerns, [or] where we may have to commission something, we do it accordingly”.
Kwasi Kwarteng
The placement process, Mr Kwarteng emphasized, had over “555, 000 candidates” that were eligible for placement out of over 571, 000 data that the ministry received from WAEC. He noted that not all candidates were eligible for placement due to the fact that not all “candidates even wrote the BECE exams” in the first place.
“Quite apart from that, we also had some of the candidates who could not pass English and Mathematics. So, those [students], we gave them the opportunity to write BECE once again and also at the cost of the ministry. So, we had an excess of about 555, 000 of these candidates that were placed where at least we had about 367,000 of them that were placed through the automatic placement. So, what was left was about 187,000 that were supposed to do the self-placement”.
Kwasi Kwarteng
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