Former Education Minister Dr Yaw Adutwum has called on developers to redesign Ghana’s Computerised School Selection and Placement System (CSSPS) so that the 55,000 BECE candidates who were not placed in the 2026 exercise can access senior high school vacancies through self‑placement.
Speaking on Eyewitness News on Tuesday, September 9, Adutwum warned that the current software could still exclude candidates if their names are not captured as eligible for self‑placement. He said the Free SHS policy was intended to eliminate the old cutoff system that had barred about 100,000 students from secondary education each year.
Adutwum argued that a strict cutoff disproportionately harmed children from rural and disadvantaged communities who may not have had the same level of preparation for the BECE as their urban counterparts. He cautioned that simply directing unplaced candidates to self‑place would not solve the problem if the CSSPS platform had already removed them from the list of eligible students.
“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.
The Ministry of Education has announced that 54,985 BECE candidates who were not placed in the initial exercise can now use the self‑placement process to select schools with available vacancies. Adutwum’s remarks follow this announcement, urging a more inclusive approach to the CSSPS.
