Former Education Minister Dr Yaw Osei Adutwum has called for a redesign of Ghana’s Computerised School Selection and Placement System (CSSPS) to ensure that all qualified BECE candidates can access available Senior High School (SHS) vacancies.
His call follows the Ministry of Education’s announcement that 54,985 candidates who were not placed during the initial 2026 school placement exercise can now use the self-placement process to select schools with available vacancies.
Dr Adutwum questioned the large number of candidates who were left out of the initial placement exercise. He said the situation could point to shortcomings in the design or operation of the CSSPS and warned that simply directing unplaced candidates to self-placement may not resolve the problem.
According to the former Education Minister, the CSSPS must be redesigned to allow candidates who have not been placed to directly access available vacancies through self-placement.
He explained that the current system could prevent some candidates from participating in self-placement if their names were not captured on the platform as eligible.
“If this is the case, then the software developers have to go and redesign the system. Otherwise, when they go and they want to find a school, their name will not be on the system for them to find the school because the system will have excluded them,” he said.
Dr Adutwum therefore urged authorities to examine the software and placement process to determine why such a significant number of candidates were not placed in the initial exercise.
The former minister also defended the original rationale behind the Free Senior High School (Free SHS) policy, arguing that it was designed to eliminate the previous cutoff system that prevented many young people from accessing secondary education.
He claimed that under the previous system, about 100,000 candidates were excluded from secondary education each year because they did not meet the required cutoff points.
Dr Adutwum said the cutoff system disproportionately affected children from rural and disadvantaged communities.
According to him, students from such communities may not have had the same educational preparation and access to resources as candidates in urban areas, making a rigid cutoff system particularly disadvantageous to them.
The Ministry of Education has announced that 54,985 BECE candidates who were not placed in the initial 2026 CSSPS exercise are eligible to use self-placement.
The process allows eligible candidates to select schools with available vacancies rather than waiting for another round of automatic placement.
However, Dr Adutwum believes the process must be structured in a way that ensures every candidate who qualifies for self-placement can actually access the available vacancies on the CSSPS platform.
His comments have renewed discussions about the effectiveness of Ghana’s computerized school placement system and whether the current system adequately supports the government’s objective of expanding access to secondary education.
The former Education Minister is calling for a review of the CSSPS to ensure that technical limitations do not prevent qualified BECE candidates from securing places in senior high schools.
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