Following government’s recent payment of resit examinations for failed students, the government has urged the 31,196 Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) candidates who failed to join the current Junior High School (JHS) three students to re-sit the exams this year.
This comes as part of its commitment to ensuring continuous access to second-cycle education in the country and enable the candidates to benefit from the Free SHS policy.
The Director-General of the Ghana Education Service (GES), Prof. Kwasi Opoku Amankwa, explained that the decision was taken by President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo to ensure that no one was denied access to quality second-cycle education in the country.
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“As part of the government’s commitment to improving access to quality second-cycle education, it has been decided that all final-year students of JHSs of the 2017/2018 academic year who were unsuccessful at the BECE and could, therefore, not be placed in senior high schools are to be re-admitted to JHS Three to enable them to re-write the BECE for the ensuing year,” he stated in an interview with the Daily Graphic in Accra.
He explained that the students could not be placed in any of the SHSs, vocational schools and technical institutes because they either scored Grade Nine in both Mathematics and English Language or had raw scores below 140.
Directive to all JHS heads
He also directed all heads of public JHSs to ensure that all students who reported at the school were re-admitted and re-registered for the next year’s BECE
“Regional directors are kindly requested to supervise their respective district directors to ensure that heads and affected students duly comply with the directive.
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“Management counts on the maximum cooperation of all stakeholders in this exercise,” Prof. Amankwa directed.
Qualified candidates
At least 490,514 candidates who sat for the BECE qualified to be in SHSs and technical institutes for the commencement of the double-track educational system.
They constituted 90 per cent of the 521,710 candidates who registered for the BECE this year.
Out of the 490,514 who qualified to be placed, 423,134 were automatically placed, while 67,362 could not be matched with any of their choices and were asked to do self-placement.