CSSPS Placement troubles could have been avoided- Dr. George Atta Boateng

Former Coordinator of the Computerised School Selection and Placement System (CSSPS), Dr. George Atta-Boateng says certain major changes within the system have contributed to the problems with student placement in Senior High Schools this year.

Among the contributing factors to the challenges which Dr. Atta-Boateng said could have been avoided, he highlighted the absence of a technical working committee, a supervisory body for the placement centre, which has been dissolved since 2017.

“It [the committee] is being handled by the [Education Ministry] and GES [Ghana Education Service] so they should answer. Why was that committee dissolved?”

The problems in the placement culminated in thousands of students and their parents or guardians trooping to the Black Star Square to rectify errors with their placement.

As Senior High schools reopen this week, a number of the students who qualified have not yet been placed by the Computerised Placement System for varying reason prompting renewed criticism of the process.

Others who were also placed want new placements.

Dr. Atta-Boateng also bemoaned the clearout of staff who had been trained in various data processing tasks over the last 13 years.

“As I speak to you today, with the exception of the secretary, all of them have been transferred… if you go to the secretariat now, we have new faces. It is only the secretary who is old.”

A key contributing factor to the struggles, according to him, is also the introduction of new software to manage the placement which he felt was needless.

“If we are seeing all these problems, would you call it [the new software] a solution?” he argued, adding that clarity was need on the reason for the changes.

“It is all about decision making, I am not saying I am against the change of the software. Probably they had reasons. They need to give us technical reasons because the old software was working [perfectly].”