The General Secretary of the Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT), Thomas Musah, has called for the establishment of well-resourced model senior high schools in each of Ghana’s 16 regions as a way of addressing the persistent challenges surrounding school placement.
Mr Musah believes the initiative would ease the intense competition for admission into a handful of traditionally sought-after schools while giving students greater access to quality second-cycle education within their respective regions.
Speaking on The Big Issue on Channel One TV, he said the proposal was first considered in the wake of challenges that emerged during the 2019 school placement exercise. He explained that the original plan was to establish model schools across the then 10 regions, with each institution adequately equipped to accommodate thousands of students.
According to Mr Musah, the establishment of strong regional institutions would reduce the need for students to travel long distances in search of admission to highly competitive schools such as Wesley Girls, Holy Child and Prempeh College.
His proposal comes amid reports that more than 55,000 candidates have not secured placement in senior high schools and TVET institutions in the 2026/27 placement exercise.
Mr Musah further suggested that well-established regional model schools could attract financial and institutional support from chiefs, Members of Parliament and other stakeholders. Such backing, he said, could help the schools develop into some of the best-performing second-cycle institutions in the country.
He said creating competitive schools across the regions would help distribute demand more evenly and ease pressure on the current placement system. “If all schools are doing well, I don’t think that somebody from the Upper East Region will be so anxious to run to Cape Coast for Wesley Girls, or Holy Child, or to Ashanti Region for Prempeh, or to Tamale, or whatever it is.
“Everybody will now be concentrated on the kind of model schools. The chiefs will be interested, the parliamentarians will be interested, all the powers that be in that particular region, all of them will be interested in resourcing that particular model school to make sure that the school is modelled and minted to become one of the best in the country based upon that particular side of the country,” he said.
