Two arrested for reportedly offering bribes to influence SHS placement

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A file photo of a man in jail

Dr Belinda Glover, the National Coordinator of the Free SHS Secretariat, has announced that two individuals have been apprehended for reportedly offering bribes and attempting to influence the placement of their children in schools.

She warned that anyone attempting to tamper with the placement system will be identified and turned over to the authorities.

Speaking to the media, Dr Belinda Glover stated, “We have been able to arrest some of them, in fact, they come with multiple sheets, trying to do changes either day to boarding. Sometimes change in the program.  

We have been able to track down those people, and have some of them to the police to deal with them”.

She added, “You can come here with more than two sheets; anything beyond that means you are here to do business with us, and we are not going to allow that. So far we have handed two people over to the Police”.

“Some of them come here with five or more placement sheets. Beyond 2, you are in for business because you can’t tell me you have five children all entering senior high school at the same time. Even with that, we followed up on some of these cases and found that they collect money from people and come here pretending to be parents. Once we detect that, we involve the police”, she added.

Meanwhile, Charles Aheto-Tsegah, a former Director-General of the Ghana Education Service (GES), has said the persistent national crisis surrounding the Computerised School Selection and Placement System (CSSPS) is due to a small elephant called protocol.

According to Charles Aheto-Tsegah, protocols have deeply undermined the supposedly merit-based electronic placement system.

The former GES boss emphasised that the system’s architects failed to account for deeply fixed patronage within the education system.

Charles Aheto-Tsegah noted that the protocols have increased in scope and impact.

He cited that previous years’ SHS data placement shows discrepancies between the number of available slots and the final admitted students.

Speaking on The Big Issue on Channel One TV on Saturday, September 27, 2025. Mr Aheto-Tsegah stated, “The protocol has actually been expanding, and that is what we have to deal with. If we want to be very fair and equitable, we need to kill that small elephant in the room called protocol”.

“We didn’t even know how to manage protocol in the system, even though we knew that it was an ever-present issue in that process, so we could manage it, and we have lived with that system right from the beginning,” he stated.

The former GES boss noted that due to the foundational flaw, the CSSPS have been dead on arrival.

Also, Kofi Asare, the Executive Director of Africa Education Watch, has said the confusion over the Computerised School Selection and Placement System (CSSPS) is because parents want top schools for their children

According to Kofi Asare, there is enough space to accommodate all qualified candidates, but parents and their children are chasing top schools.

Speaking on The Big Issue on Channel One TV on Saturday, September 27, 2025, Kofi Asare stated, “The problems are not entirely new, apart from one which is new, a problem that was resolved in the past, I don’t know how it resurfaced this year. But generally, the issues relating to parents’ resentment of schools that the computer placed them in are normal, and they are going to be with us so long as we have inadequate resources as a lower-middle-income country”.

“The government of Ghana has adequate spaces to accommodate all 590k or so candidates who have qualified for placement. What the Government of Ghana does not have is the taste of all the 590k students. So there will definitely be some dis-equilibrium between the expectation of candidates, parents on one side and government’s ability to provide education to their taste,” he stressed.

Kofi Asare further explained, “Everybody wants to attend a good Category A and Category B school. You have about 700 plus Senior High Schools, and then you have people chasing about 100 schools. So these issues will continue to emerge so far as there are resource deficits”.

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