Isaac Adongo, Member of Parliament for Bolgatanga Central and Minority Spokesperson on Finance, has appealed to the Ghana Education Service (GES) and the Ministry of Education to prolong the deadline for the placement of students into the senior high schools.

The GES has extended the window of placement by 48 hours, after it discovered that over 150,000 qualified candidates had still not been placed, 24 hours after the initial deadline expired.

This means the affected students now have up to Tuesday, September 5 to complete the placement processes.

“For those who have not been placed in any of their options, we are asking them to continue to select schools on Monday [September 4] and Tuesday [September 5]. By next week Tuesday, we will do our review to assess the situation and take the next decision,” the Acting Director-General of the GES, Professor Kwesi Opoku-Amankwa, said in an interview.

He told Accra-based Citi FM that: “By Monday and Tuesday, we are expecting that they will be able to purchase the card and then go online to either print their admission forms or select a school.” He added: “The GES could have done the placement by itself, but this time around, we are giving them the option to do what we call self-placement.”

But speaking in an interview with Chief Jerry Forson, host of Accra 100.5FM’s Ghana Yensom on Monday, September 4, Mr Adongo said: “I will urge the GES and the Ministry to extend the deadline to up to two weeks and also do an extensive publicity on it because there are several people in the hinterlands who do not have access to the internet and will therefore, rely on others to check it form them.

“If the deadline is not extended several of the students would be cut off and be denied the free senior high school. Already, the programme is not covering the second and third year students and so we should not cut off a chunk of the first year’s students who are supposed to benefit from the programme.”