No Form One or Two student in any Junior High School (JHS) should be registered as a candidate to write Ghana’s Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE), the Ghana Education Service (GES) has directed.

A directive from the GES to heads of all basic schools in the country dated October 23, 2017 stated, “Registration of candidates for the BECE for school candidates is strictly for students in JHS Form Three only”.

It has thus warned head of both public and private basic schools to cease forthwith, the practice of registering students who have not gone through Form Three, to write the examination.

Over the years, a number of students in Form One and Two at the JHS level who are considered brilliant, have through the consent of their parents, been registered by their schools to write the BECE.

But the directive signed by the acting Director General of the GES, Prof Kwasi Opoku-Amankwa said, “Students in JHS Form One and Two are ineligible to register and write the BECE”.

The new directive comes on the back of the recent story of a 13-year-old student of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ruth Ama Gyan-Darkwa, who sat for the BECE at the age of nine while in JHS One at Justice International School in Kumasi.

It said candidates who wish to re-sit the exams should register as private candidates because they “are not qualified to register with the regular candidates”.

The GES also warned headteachers against registering students from other schools to write the BECE in the name of their schools without the proper transfer documents.

Again, it said Information and Communication Technology and French are only optional subjects to schools not candidates.

The GES has consequently asked directors of education at the regional, metro, municipal and levels to ensure that heads of basic schools strictly comply with the directives, warning “Any headteacher found to have gone contrary to the directives will be severely sanctioned by management”.