The Minister of Education, Dr Yaw Osei Adutwum, has restated 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.
He, therefore, 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 have the right skills and the right knowledge to teach.
Speaking during a press conference on the Ghana Teacher Licensure Examination in Accra yesterday, he assured 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 have the right skill and knowledge and what it takes to become a teacher.
Committee
He further revealed that the Ministry had put in place a seven-member committee that would look at the extent to which the Ghana Teacher Licensure Examination (GTLE) is 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.
Terms of Reference for the committee, he explained, include 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 to enable recommendations to be made the Minster for appropriate action.
He added that the committee would also look at the quality of students being admitted into the teacher education institutions relative to the grades and programmes 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.
Performance
The Registrar of the National Teaching Council (NTC), Dr Christian Addai Poku, recounted how the introduction of serialization into their GTLE averted collusion and copying among candidates in the examination.
He disclosed that all the candidates who wrote the 2023 GTLE 1 had re-sat several times, adding that some of them had sat two to 10 times. He added that the 6,451 who failed the recent exams represent only 5 per cent of all the 145,050 candidates who had written the GTLE out of the which 95 per cent have so far passed.
Judging from the examination results, the NTC Registrar said it was clear that some of the candidates were not fit to even enter teacher education institutions in the first place.
