Education Minister Haruna Iddrisu has assured students awaiting senior high school placement that the Computerised School Selection and Placement System (CSSPS) team will attend to all of them before schools resume on September 18.
He gave the assurance during a courtesy visit to the CSSPS Centre at the GNAT Hall in Accra, where he promised that the government would resolve the placement crisis over time.
The Minister traced the difficulties largely to the heavy demand for category A schools, which far outstrips available spaces. He announced plans to overhaul and review the CSSPS, expand infrastructure in the most sought-after schools, and build new model schools in deprived areas with World Bank support.
CSSPS Has Placed 87 Percent of Qualified Students
Hon. Iddrisu said the system has already placed the vast majority of qualified candidates. “Out of 604,000 who are qualified to be placed, we have placed 527,000, representing 87%,” he disclosed.
He told anxious students and parents at the centre that the process would continue even after school reopens. “No student, desirous and qualified, will be left behind,” he stated, adding that every qualified candidate would have access to secondary education.
The Minister explained that vacancies exist across all three categories of schools, with category C holding the most spaces, followed by category B and then category A. The real pressure, he said, comes from the preference many candidates show for category A schools.
Demand for Category A Schools Drives Placement Crisis
To illustrate the scale of the problem, the Minister pointed to the gap between applications and available places. “As I stated earlier, if you have applications of 313,000 against vacancies of 76,000, you have a real difficulty accommodating everybody within the numbers,” he said.
He urged candidates to consider category C schools, noting that students who attended such schools have gone on to perform well at the university level and beyond.
Hon. Iddrisu appealed to affected families to show patience while the team works through the complaints. He said he had directed the CSSPS team to be humane in handling the concerns, citing the case of a student who wanted to pursue science but had been placed in home economics.
Minister Defends Merit and Independence of CSSPS
The Minister maintained that the placement system remains largely based on merit. He explained that the algorithm gives priority to candidates who selected a school as their first choice, so a student who listed a school lower down cannot automatically displace those who ranked it first.
He, however, drew a firm line on unfair outcomes. The Minister said it would be wrong for a candidate with an aggregate 30 or 40 to secure a category A school while students with aggregates of seven, eight or nine miss out. “I find that unacceptable and will not accommodate that,” he declared.
Hon. Iddrisu also stressed that neither he, his deputy nor the Director General of the Ghana Education Service has access to the system. According to him, this arrangement is “to allow it to operate independently, autonomously and in a transparent manner.”
Catchment Areas and Reserved Slots Under Review
The Minister raised questions about the various reservations within the placement process, including slots for alumni, faith-based institutions, traditional rulers and opinion leaders. He suggested that such reservations amount to protocol placements rather than merit.
He said government places greater value on catchment areas, so that students can attend schools close to their homes. In his view, the community in which a school is located deserves some priority in placement decisions.
Hon. Iddrisu said the lasting solution lies in long term investment in dormitories, classrooms, laboratories and workshops. He revealed that government is expanding category A schools and working with the World Bank to build 10 new model category A schools in deprived parts of the country.
This support comes under the US$300 million World Bank financing package for the Transformative Secondary Education for Access, Results and Relevance for Jobs (STARR-J) Project, which the World Bank Board approved in June 2026.
Government expects that by 2027, no secondary school in Ghana will be running the double-track system. Parliament has since approved the US$300 million facility to finance secondary education.
Ato Forson Blames Previous Administration for Infrastructure Gap
Finance Minister and MP for Ajumako Enyan-Essiam Constituency, Dr. Cassiel Ato Forson recently linked the placement challenges to the previous New Patriotic Party administration.
Speaking in an interview in Kumasi, he argued that the NPP government failed to continue secondary school infrastructure investment begun under Presidents Nkrumah, Mills and Mahama in his first term.
Dr. Ato Forson assured Ghanaians that the Mahama administration has secured the World Bank funding under the STARR-J Project to close the infrastructure gap. With schools set to reopen this week, the government’s promise to place every qualified student will face its first real test in the coming days.
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