The Ministry of Education has extended the 2026 Senior High School (SHS) placement exercise by one week to give students with outstanding placement issues more time to secure schools before the new academic year begins on September 18.
The extension covers students who are yet to secure schools through the self-placement process, as well as those seeking changes to their residential status.
Resolution centres established across the country will remain open throughout the week to assist students and parents with unresolved placement cases.
The Press Secretary to the Education Minister, Hashmin Mohammed, said the extension was necessary to reduce the number of outstanding cases before students report to school.
Mr Mohammed said 33,726 of the 53,887 students eligible for self-placement had successfully secured places in various schools.
This means more than 20,000 students in the self-placement category had yet to complete the process at the time of the latest update.
The self-placement option is available to eligible candidates who were not matched with one of their selected schools during the initial Computerised School Selection and Placement System (CSSPS) exercise. It allows them to choose from schools with available vacancies.
The Ministry has maintained that there is sufficient capacity within the second-cycle system, although concerns have persisted over whether available spaces match students’ preferred schools, programmes and boarding options.
The CSSPS Secretariat has also received 9,948 cases at resolution centres nationwide.
Of those, 4,531 have been resolved, according to the Education Ministry.
The remaining cases are expected to be addressed during the additional week, with the Ministry targeting a significant reduction in outstanding cases before students report on September 18.
“The resolution centres will remain active from Monday till Friday, and we are hoping that by Friday, the numbers should be able to go down because on September 18, they will report to school,” Mr Mohammed said.
The extension comes after the Ministry previously postponed the release of the 2026/2027 CSSPS placement results.
The results were initially scheduled for August 31 but were moved to September 4 after the Ministry identified about 20,000 qualified candidates whose school-choice information had not been uploaded to the CSSPS platform.
The Ministry said the additional time was intended to ensure eligible students were not excluded because of incomplete data submissions.