By Kofi Akordor
THE introduction of the junior and senior secondary schools concept as part of the educational reform of 1987 saw the abolition of the Common Entrance Examination to select students for the next stage on the education ladder. That brought pressure on school heads who had tough times picking from the large number of candidates who, by the standard and criteria set by the Ghana Education Service (GES), qualified to gain admission to secondary schools.
In that tight demand-and-supply environment, many things emerged, including corruption and favouritism in the admission process.
Apart from the fact that school heads had to find ways of making head or tail out of the admission quagmire, they had to contend with other forces waiting at the fringes to stake their claim to the few vacant places existing in some of the schools. These included old students associations, church leaders, traditional authorities, politicians, drinking/play mates and, of course, money people who could pay their way through any obstacle to get whatever they wanted.
At the end of the day, school heads were seen more or less as villains who were out to exploit parents and deprive candidates of their first-choice schools. While these were going on, the GES thought of a remedy. That was when the idea of the Computerised Schools Selection and Placement System (CSSPS) was conceived.
The computers, it was assumed, were expected to defy human manipulation so all parties were assured that the admission blues would be over. Unfortunately, that does not seem to be the case. Since the introduction of the CSSPS, parents and students have always been at loggerheads with the GES and school heads over the placement of students in schools.
Every year comes with its own experience. The computer can also play its own tricks. It can send girls to boys-only schools and the other way round. It can send candidates to far away places they and their parents have not heard of before. But as had always been explained, it is what we put into the computer that is returned to us. “Garbage in, garbage out”, is the computer language. That is why it is very important parents and students alongside school authorities pay serious attention to the information they feed into the computers. However, the greatest worry of most parents was that their children, even with the best of grades, never got the schools of their choice. The human manipulation is gone or at least curtailed but the computer has not brought any solace or respite to pupils, parents and educational authorities.
Last week, Dr Harriet Somuah, Chief Executive of Somuah Information Systems (SISCO) Limited, designers of the programme used for the selection, went to great pains to explain how the system worked and gave the assurance that it cannot be manipulated.
An official of the Ministry of Education, Mr Paul Krampah, also defended the electronic placement system, saying everything was done on merit based on the raw scores of candidates.
Ironically, while parents are criss-crossing the country and knocking at doors to get schools for their children, the GES continues to remind parents that there are more than enough vacancies in the senior high schools to absorb all qualified candidates. In fact, the hard truth is that a great number of the schools in both the public and private sectors never get even half of their school enrolment requirements for the academic year.
This brings us to the hard reality that the problem is not about the availability of schools but the lack of good schools that would make parents and students to confidently select them. ‘Good’ here means adequate physical infrastructure such as good classrooms, laboratory, and library and boarding facilities, teaching and administrative personnel, all adding up to provide the congenial and disciplined atmosphere for academic work. Above all, parents see a good school as the one with a track record of academic excellence over the years which will guarantee a better future for their children.
This is where we should begin to address the problem from. Our schools have not developed evenly over the years and nobody should pretend that there is no class system in the educational sector. The truth that must be told is that a lot of our students at the junior high school level, who are in the majority, through no fault of theirs can never gain admission to the so-called first class senior high schools that have a record of high academic performance over the years.
The placement result in one school — St Thomas Aquinas Senior High School in Accra — illustrates clearly what is becoming a national situation. That pupils from most of our public schools cannot compete with pupils from private schools. In the St Thomas Aquinas case, out of the 90 students placed in General Science, 68 came from private schools. This unfortunate trend should be seriously addressed.
It is also incontestable that students of some of senior high schools, who through official neglect, connivance and abandonment can never pass the final examination with very good grades to enter the universities and pursue certain courses that could easily put them in strong contention on the job market in future. So do we blame parents who are bent on securing admission for their children in certain particular schools?
By now we should realise that no amount of appeals and assurances will soften the hearts of some parents if they do not get what they see as the only guarantee for their children’s future. That is a school which does not only exist in name but in deeds. They want schools which have track records and can deliver.
What we should, therefore, do for the sake of the future of our children is to bring as many schools to the level of the so-called big and affluent ones. We need to expand physical infrastructure such as classrooms, accommodation for teaching and non-teaching, library and laboratory facilities and the provision of quality human resources and all the teaching and learning materials so that choosing between two schools will become very difficult.
If the Kufuor administration had carried to its logical conclusion its pledge to provide every district with at least one model school with facilities comparable to some of the celebrated ones, our current problem would have been partly, in fact, greatly, solved. The idea is still good and we pray that the Mills administration will continue with it so that every district will have at least one school which can serve the purpose the current big ones are serving to assuage the fears of parents.
Ultimately, there is a serious need for a general overhauling of the educational system. It goes beyond merely changing of names and haggling over course duration. It is interesting to realise that most of the schools which continue to hold attractions to parents and students are those belonging to the religious missions, especially the Catholic, Presbyterian, Anglican and Methodist churches. These are schools with a good amount of disciplinary control of their students. And the difference in their examination results is clear.
Discipline in most of the government-controlled schools is very weak even though some of them could boast of impressive physical infrastructure. This is the challenge to the GES, the Ministry of Education, the Conference of Heads of Assisted Secondary Schools (CHASS), old students unions, parents and students.
Until we are able to improve upon physical infrastructure, expand facilities in existing schools, upgrade facilities in schools in the districts and bring them to equal level with those in the urban centres and cities, and until there is something close to equilibrium in the educational field and social and economic barriers are reduced to the barest minimum, the computer will for a long time do the placement all right but that will not take away the disappointment, pain and dejection from the hearts of many parents and BECE candidates.
I wish to take this opportunity to express my sincerest gratitude to all those individuals and organisations who sent me messages of congratulation after this year’s GJA Media Awards. They are many, but let me mention, the ABANTU for Development, the Asogli Traditional Council and the Ho Development Association.
fokofi@yahoo.co.uk
kofiakordor.blogspot.com
No comments:
Post a Comment