The persistent national crisis surrounding the Computerised School Selection and Placement System (CSSPS), which has seen repeated outbreaks of confusion and parental protests at placement centres, can only be solved by confronting the "small elephant in the room" of protocol admissions.

This was the stern diagnosis delivered by Charles Aheto-Tsegah, a former Director-General of the Ghana Education Service (GES), during an appearance on The Big Issue on Channel One TV on Saturday, September 27, 2025. Mr. Aheto-Tsegah, who oversaw a portion of the CSSPS's implementation during his tenure, insisted that extra-system admissions—colloquially known as "protocol"—have fundamentally destabilised the ostensibly merit-based electronic placement system.

The former GES boss launched a scathing critique of the CSSPS's design, arguing its failure was predictable from the start.

The CSSPS, introduced years ago to automate the placement of hundreds of thousands of Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) graduates into Senior High Schools (SHS), was intended to eliminate the very human interference that "protocol" represents.

Mr. Aheto-Tsegah argued that the system's architects failed to account for deeply ingrained patronage within the education system.

“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. Due to this foundational flaw, he flatly deemed the CSSPS to have been "dead on arrival."

Mr. Aheto-Tsegah defined protocol as the immense pressure exerted by parents and influential figures on Headmasters and GES officials to admit students, often those with lower qualifying grades, into highly coveted schools outside the official, computerized placement list.

He revealed that, rather than diminishing over time, this practice has actively increased in scope and impact. Data from previous years’ placement exercises often show discrepancies between the number of available slots and the final admitted students, with the difference often attributed to these discretionary admissions.

He pointed out that every single extra-system admission effectively displaces a student who qualified strictly through the electronic merit mechanism.

“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,” he argued.

The former Director-General stressed that until the government and school authorities implement a zero-tolerance policy—backed by stringent auditing of school admissions registers and decisive penalties for non-compliance—the annual chaos and congestion witnessed at the resolution centres will continue to undermine public faith in the CSSPS process.