Ghana SHS School Placement, We Have a Child-Intelligence Problem

By Lord Fiifi Quayle

Every year, around this time, Ghana goes through this same ritual.

Parents become anxious. Phones begin ringing. WhatsApp groups become command centres. Relatives start asking questions. People begin looking for someone who knows someone who can “help.”

Then comes the familiar conversation:

“Where has your child been placed?”

And when the answer is not what the family expected, another question follows:

“Do you know anybody at the Ministry?”

We call it the school placement problem.

I think we are calling it by the wrong name.

Ghana does not fundamentally have a school placement problem. We have a child-intelligence problem.

We are trying to make an important decision about a child at the very end of a journey during which we have failed to systematically understand the child.

That is the real problem.

The controversy surrounding the Computerised School Selection and Placement System is therefore much bigger than CSSPS. The system is doing what an allocation system is designed to do: match candidates to available spaces based on examination performance, preferences and capacity.

But what information are we giving the system?

And, more importantly, how much do we really know about the child before we ask a computer to determine the child’s next three years?

We discover our children too late

Think about the absurdity of it.

A child enters Kindergarten at perhaps four or five years old.

For years, teachers observe that child.

Parents observe that child.

The child reads, writes, calculates, draws, builds, speaks, experiments, struggles, improves, leads, collaborates and develops interests.

By primary school, patterns are already emerging.

By JHS1, many strengths and weaknesses are visible.

By JHS2, they are even clearer.

Yet by JHS3, we suddenly behave as though the child’s future is a mystery that must be solved by one major examination and a school selection form.

That is not intelligence.

That is delayed information.

A serious education system should know much more about a child than the final examination score.

It should know the child’s trajectory.

Not just whether a child scored 75 today, but whether that child moved from 45 to 75 over three years.

It should know whether a child demonstrates exceptional mathematical reasoning.

Whether another has unusual spatial intelligence.

Whether another has a gift for language.

Whether another is consistently building things with their hands.

Whether another has strong creative ability.

Whether another struggles with literacy and requires intervention.

Whether another has developed an extraordinary interest in computing, agriculture, engineering, business or the arts.

These are not trivial observations.

They are signals of human capital.

And we are currently leaving much of that capital unpriced.

This is where Capitalising Citizenship begins

My Capitalising Citizenship framework starts from a simple proposition:

The greatest asset of a nation is its people.

But if citizens are an asset, then a serious country must become much better at identifying, developing and deploying their capabilities.

We have become reasonably good at counting children.

We know how many sat BECE.

We know how many qualified.

We know how many were placed.

We know how many vacancies exist.

But we need to become much better at knowing the child behind the number.

Imagine a different Ghana.

A child enters Kindergarten and begins accumulating a developmental record.

Not a permanent label.

Not an intelligence caste system.

Not a system that tells a six-year-old, “You are a science student” or “You are not academic.”

Rather, a living profile of development.

At seven, we might know that the child needs support with numeracy.

At nine, we might see extraordinary reading ability.

At eleven, we might notice strong spatial reasoning.

At thirteen, the pattern might be becoming unmistakable: mathematics, science, technology and practical problem-solving.

By JHS2, the parents should not be desperately asking where their child might fit.

They should already have a reasonably sophisticated answer.

The system should have been telling them.

Imagine receiving this before placement

Instead of waiting for a placement result, imagine a parent receiving a “Learner Capital Statement”:

Academic trajectory: Strong

Mathematics: Very strong

Science: Strong

Literacy: Developing

Spatial reasoning: Exceptional

Practical aptitude: High

Technology interest: High

Priority intervention: Written communication

Recommended pathways: STEM / Engineering / Technical

Secondary-school environment: Strong fit with STEM-oriented institutions

Now the parent has information.

The teacher has information.

The child has information.

The education authorities have information.

And when placement eventually takes place, the question changes.

It is no longer simply:

“Can I get my child into Prempeh College, Achimota, PRESEC, Wesley Girls, Mfantsipim or another prestigious school?”

It becomes:

“Which educational environment is most likely to develop this particular child?”

That is a much more intelligent question.

The prestige problem

There is another uncomfortable issue we must confront.

Our placement system is also dealing with a problem of concentrated demand.

The numbers from the 2026 placement exercise tell their own story. More than 313,000 candidates selected Category A schools as their first choice, while the declared Category A vacancies were only about 76,000.

You cannot solve that problem simply by telling parents to choose differently.

Parents are behaving rationally.

They believe that certain schools provide better opportunities, stronger networks, better university prospects and greater social mobility.

So they compete for them.

The real policy question is therefore not:

“Why do parents all want Category A schools?”

It is:

“Why have we allowed educational opportunity to become so strongly concentrated around a relatively small group of school brands?”

If Ghana genuinely wants to solve the placement problem, we must improve the quality and credibility of the alternatives.

A school should not become less valuable simply because it is called Category B or Category C.

The ultimate objective should be to create a system where parents choose based on fit and outcomes, not merely prestige.

And this is where “protocol” enters

There is a reason parents look for connections.

When a system is high-stakes, capacity constrained and difficult to understand, people naturally seek intermediaries.

If I do not understand why my child was placed somewhere, I look for somebody who can change the decision.

That is how the “protocol economy” grows.

I am not suggesting that every placement difficulty is caused by corruption.

It isn’t.

But there is a broader institutional principle at work:

Opacity creates demand for influence.

The solution is therefore not simply to tell parents not to call politicians.

Give them a system they can understand.

Show them the vacancies.

Show them the criteria.

Show them their child’s profile.

Show them the alternatives.

Show them why a particular placement was made.

Create a credible appeal mechanism.

When citizens can see the logic of a decision, they are less likely to search for somebody who can circumvent it.

That is how institutions become stronger.

The teacher should become a national talent scout

There is another change I would like to see.

We should stop treating teachers as people who simply produce marks.

A good teacher knows things about a child that an examination can never reveal.

The teacher knows who asks difficult questions.

Who never gives up.

Who quietly solves problems.

Who can explain a complicated idea to classmates.

Who can dismantle a machine and put it back together.

Who is struggling because of a learning gap.

Who has improved dramatically.

Who is capable of far more than the examination result suggests.

That professional knowledge is national intelligence.

We should capture it appropriately, ethically and systematically.

Not to imprison children in categories, but to ensure that important information does not disappear when the child changes schools.

This is not about predicting a child’s destiny

This distinction matters.

A learner profile must never become a prison.

If a child is weak in mathematics at age seven, that cannot mean the child can never become an engineer.

Children change.

Circumstances change.

Teachers change.

Interventions work.

Talent develops at different speeds.

So the objective is not to predict a child’s destiny.

It is to increase the quality of the information available when decisions are made.

That is what intelligence does.

It reduces uncertainty.

And anyone who has followed my work on uncertainty will understand why I consider this important.

We spend enormous amounts of money managing uncertainty in financial markets, sovereign debt, currency markets and investment.

Yet we tolerate extraordinary uncertainty when allocating the educational future of our children.

That does not make economic sense.

From Free SHS to Intelligent SHS

Ghana has already made a historic intervention in access through Free SHS.

The next phase of the education conversation should be about something deeper.

Not simply:

How many children can we put into secondary school?

But:

How intelligently can we develop every child who enters secondary school?

That means moving from:

Access → Quality → Fit → Capability → Productivity.

The future Ghanaian education system should eventually be able to answer a question far more important than “Where was this child placed?”

It should answer:

“What capabilities are emerging among Ghana’s children, where are they emerging, and what must the country do to develop them?”

Imagine government knowing, in aggregate, where future engineers are emerging.

Where the strongest mathematical talent is concentrated.

Where technical aptitude is being developed.

Where literacy deficits are becoming entrenched.

Where girls are being lost from STEM.

Where schools are producing exceptional outcomes.

Where infrastructure is failing to meet emerging demand.

That is no longer merely education administration.

That is national economic intelligence.

The child is Ghana’s most important undeveloped asset

We often speak about Ghana’s gold, oil, cocoa, lithium and other natural resources.

We should.

But the most important resource is sitting in our classrooms.

And unlike gold, human potential does not come out of the ground already refined.

It has to be discovered.

Developed.

Protected.

Matched with opportunity.

And eventually converted into productive capability.

That is the essence of Capitalising Citizenship.

The country that becomes best at discovering what its citizens can become will ultimately have an enormous advantage over the country that merely counts what they have already achieved.

So I do not think our ambition should be to build a placement system that makes every parent happy.

That is impossible.

Nor should the ambition be to guarantee every child their first-choice school.

That is equally impossible.

Our ambition should be much higher.

We should build a system in which no child is educationally misunderstood.

By Kindergarten, we begin observing.

By primary school, we begin understanding.

By JHS, we begin guiding.

By the time placement arrives, the parent should not be discovering their child’s capabilities.

They should already know them.

The examination should confirm part of the story, not suddenly write it.

And the computer should allocate a place based on intelligence that has been accumulated over years, rather than information compressed into one high-stakes moment.

Because the question Ghana should ultimately be asking is not:

“Where can we place this child?”

It is:

“Where can this child become?”

That is the education reform conversation Ghana should be having.

And that is how we begin Capitalising Citizenship.