The Education Minister, Dr Yaw Osei Adutwum, has announced that the Ministry will continue to liaise with its agencies and other stakeholders to ensure that the nation’s education continues to train the right manpower for the nation.
For this, he lauded the leadership of the National Teaching Council (NTC) for its gatekeeping role of ensuring that graduates from education institutions are of the right make, and the right skills and the right knowledge to teach.
Dr Adutwum stated this on Tuesday during a press briefing on the Ghana Teacher Licensure Examination in Accra.
The briefing was aimed at assuring the nation of effort being made by the government to improve teacher education and education development in general in the country.
He praised the NTC for putting in place prudent measures which prevented any form of cheating and other forms of malpractice that could have led to a massive pass by the candidates and would not reflect exactly what they were.
The Education Minister stated that everything possible was being done to ensure that people who qualify for any teacher education institution had the right skill and knowledge and what it takes to become a teacher.
Dr Adutwum indicated that the Ministry has put in place a seven-member committee that would look at the extent to which the GTLE was aligned to the National Teachers’ Standard and other supporting policies or frameworks such as the National Teacher Education Curriculum Framework (NTECF), the Pre-Tertiary Curriculum and Pre-Tertiary Teacher Professional Development and Management.
The Terms of Reference for the committee includes checking on the selection process of students into teacher education institutions, the possibility of integrating the GTLE into the teacher education institutions’ programmes, examining best practices and what works globally and also make recommendations to the Minster for the right action to be taken.
The committee would also look at the quality of students being admitted into the teacher education institutions relative to the grade and programme of specialization at the senior high schools among other terms of reference.
The Education Minister said the Ministry was looking at a possible introduction of entrance assessment as part of the selection process for teacher education admission.
Membership of the Committee which would be chaired by the Deputy Minister for Education in charge of General Education, Rev. John Ntim Fordjour are representatives of the Head of a Public College of Education, Prof. Samuel Atintonoo, from Accra College of Education, Head of a Private College of Education, Rev Msgr Louis Kofi Tuffour, Christ The Teacher College of Education.
The others are the Chief Director at the Ministry of Education, Mrs Mamle Andrews, a representative from institutions that trained teachers, Prof. Jonathan Fletcher, University of Ghana, a professor of testing, Prof. Eric Anane, University of Cape Coast, Mr Lawrence Sarpong of NTC.
The committee has four weeks to submit its report to the Education Minister for the necessary action to follow
Dr Christian Addai Poku, Registrar of the National Teaching Council, recounted how the introduction of serialization into their GTLE averted collusion and copying among candidates in the examination.
He stated that all the candidates who wrote the 2023 GTLE 1 had resat several times and indicated that some of them had sat 2 to 10 times, adding that the 6,451 who failed the recent exams represent only 5 per cent of all the 145,050 candidates who have written the GTLE out of the which 95 per cent have so far passed.
The Registrar said judging from the examination results, it was clear that some of the candidates did not fit to even enter teacher education institutions in the first place.
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