The National Teaching Council (NTC) is following a roadmap to phase out non-professional teachers from Ghana’s education system in the near future.
Announcing this news in Kumasi, Christian Addai-Poku, executive director of the Council, said: “We have a roadmap that we are following to ensure that anybody who teaches a Ghanaian child, in both private and public schools, must be a trained person.”
Fit for purpose
He was speaking to the media after monitoring the fifth batch of Ghana Teacher Licensure Examination students at the St Louis College of Education, where hundreds of teachers were sitting for the exams.
On Sunday about 14,500 trainee teachers across the country wrote the exams, which were originally scheduled for March this year, but were postponed in response to the outbreak of COVID-19.
Addai-Poku said it is important to sanitise the system through the licensure examination to ensure that all teachers who handled children in schools were fit for purpose. The Council is talking to proprietors of private schools so that in the next few years, such schools would engage only trained teachers, he said. This will help to improve teaching standards.
“Anybody coming from a training institution that trains teachers is expected to pass this licensure exam,” Addai-Poku said. “It will come to a time that a private school may not be able to recruit a non-professional teacher.”
He said that, on average, 70% of teachers who have taken the licensure exams have been successful. Those who have failed to make the grade have been given opportunities to resit.
The Council, Addai-Poku said, is committed to improving teaching standards in Ghana by ensuring that teachers are licensed before they could be inducted into the profession.
Yussif Ibrahim
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