The New Patriotic Party (NPP) has called on the government to find actual school places for all 54,985 Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) candidates who were not initially placed in senior high schools.

The party also wants the government to publish the final number of affected candidates who secure school placements after the ongoing self-placement exercise.

The call follows the government’s decision to allow 53,887 of the affected candidates to return to the Computerised School Selection and Placement System (CSSPS) portal for self-placement, after they were initially told they had not qualified for secondary school.

The NPP, however, argues that access to the placement portal does not amount to securing a place in a classroom.

“Ghanaian parents and candidates will judge the resolution of the challenge by one thing only: how many of the original 54,985 are sitting in a classroom, not how many were allowed to open a website,” the party said in a statement signed by the Chairman of the NPP Policy Co-ordination Committee, Kojo Oppong Nkrumah.

The opposition party said the government should take immediate steps to ensure that all the affected candidates have a clear path into secondary education.

The party said government figures indicate that the country has 859,828 vacancies for 623,072 BECE candidates, suggesting that the challenge is not a general shortage of school places.

It said the main pressure was on Category A schools, where 313,283 candidates reportedly selected such schools as their first choice despite the schools having only 76,417 available seats.

The NPP urged the government to explore ways to improve facilities, teaching capacity and programmes in schools that continue to have unfilled spaces.

It also called for the use of the 85 private schools participating in the Free SHS programme to absorb some of the affected candidates.