70 Districts have 6,000 untrained teachers

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03-06-09

AN exercise carried out by the Teacher Education Division of the Ghana Education Service (GES) has revealed that there are 6,000 untrained teachers in 70 of the 170 districts of the country.
The figure is likely to increase when the remaining 100 districts submit the names and schools of untrained teachers by the end of this month.
The Director of the division, Mr Victor Mantey, told the Daily Graphic that the exercise was carried out to know whether there were still untrained teachers in the system following the introduction of the Untrained Teacher Training in Basic Education (UTTBE) programme in 2004.
The UTTBE programme was introduced when it was identified during a census that there were 24,000 untrained teachers in the system.
The programme was to train those who were untrained thereby leading to the award of diploma after their four-year training period.
The first and second phases of the UTTBE programme are expected to end this year while the third phase is expected to end in 2010 with a fourth phase ending in 2011.
The Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT) recently expressed worry about the large number of untrained teachers at the primary educational level and called for immediate action to reverse the trend.
According to the association, about 41 per cent of primary school teachers of the Ghana Education Service (GES) were untrained.
Mr Mantey explained that his outfit was considering the feasibility of organising another training programme for those that had been identified in the exercise.
He said as part of efforts to improve teacher quality, the GES introduced the top up programme for about 60,000 Certificate ‘A’ teachers to upgrade themselves for the award of diploma.
Mr Mantey said the first batch of 11,000 Certificate ‘A’ teachers that undertook the programme would pass out this month after their two-year period of studies and the second batch of 11,000 Certificate ‘A’ teachers would start the programme next month.
He said all the Certificate ‘A’ teachers were supposed to be upgraded to diploma status by 2012 or have themselves to blame.
Asked why the colleges of education were not allowed to increase intake in spite of the capacity of some of them to take in more students, he said there was a quota to admit 9,000 teacher trainees yearly and that they could not take more because of monetary constraints.