The Registrar of the National Teaching Council, Dr. Christian Addai-Poku, says the loss of experienced teachers to the United Kingdom ought to be a major concern for the country.
Last week, the registrar had raised concern about the high attrition rate in the nation’s education sector, and the threat it poses towards the future of the nation’s educational system and development.
According to him, early this year a little over 16,000 Ghanaian teachers applied to the Department of Education in the UK for employment and by June 13th 2023, 10,000 of the applicants with Ghana Teacher Licenses had been certified to work in the UK without any further assessment (qualified teacher status test) by the UK government.
He appealed to the government and all other stakeholders to put in place the right measures to curb the situation to avoid looming danger.
Speaking on JoyNews’ Newsfile, he clarified that the danger was not the shortage of teachers in Ghana but rather the loss of experienced teachers.
He explained that, “On average we’re churning out about 30,000 teachers who pass licensure examinations every year. But it is not everybody that is absorbed by the Ghana Education Service, and so we still have a lot there who will be able to replace those who may leave.
“But the challenge is if they are leaving, sometimes you get experienced teachers leaving and you need to bring people to train them to the level that these people might have been. But all in all, there’s no teacher shortage in Ghana as at now…the looming danger is the experience teachers who are leaving and that is our worry, that experienced teachers are leaving.”
He stated that with more experienced teachers leaving the nation, it would have to spend more money and time training new ones to fill in the gaps.
“And if experienced teachers are leaving, and the nation is spending so much in the training of teachers and we’re not getting anything from them then it becomes a challenge,” he said.
