Paa Kwesi Arko Cee, The Author
The Nana Addo Dankwa Akoffo Addo government is in haste to push for a licensing program for all Ghanaian teachers starting this year. Though the initiative is a good one and should be embraced if the professional standards and values of teachers are to be raised.
However, the by force implementation of the project by hook or crook [ads1]this year with the just trained teachers from colleges of the country must be halted by the government. This is because if the program has come to stay then it must not be done in haste. You cannot make a forest the same year you planted the trees. The just trained teachers who may be the first set of teachers to write are only fresh out of college with minimum professional values compared to thealready posted and working teachers in the system. Assessing the professional skills of a newly trained teacher who hasn’t handled a whole class before cannot be the best way of obtaining comprehensive information about the professional values and skills of teachers. We cannot issue a license to a driver before he sit behind the steer independently.
Also the introduction of the policy is an effort which directly undermines the credibility and integrity of work done by all the Colleges of Education. This is because unlike the Colleges of Health which administers end-of semester examinations on their own, the Colleges of Education relies on external examination bodies like the Institute of Education at Cape Coast for all their examination. The question we need to ask is why the Colleges of Education undergo an all-external examinations and after trainees have proved themselves competent, has to sit again for an external examination in the name of license? The only answer to this poetry is that perhaps the government does not believe in the work done by the colleges as well as the Institute of Education which conducts examinations for teacher trainees across the country.
The best way to have introduced the initiative was to give the autonomy of conducting examination to the colleges themselves then the NCTE steps in and require that trainees justify their professionalism by taking the license exams before they are recruited.
Then again, the NCTE which has overnight become in love with issuing licenses to teachers could have asked the just trained teachers to start work, practice for a specified duration of time and gain the professional values before they take the exams. Also they could have begun with teachers who are already in the system who have had ample expenditure of time to acquire a beam of professional experiences.
Does it not raise eyebrows that come September, the Nana Addo Dankwa Akoffo Addo government, thanksgiving to him though, is going to recruit about 9000 teachers who are untrained to stock the Double Strand SHS program without them first taking a license exams while trained teachers going to the basic schools are demanded to write a license exams. The question again is who is in charge of these imbalances coming from the same administration?
Unless some serious measures are patiently put in place the essence of the whole program may boomerang and will not be a test for the professional values for teachers but a kind of B.E.C.E for basic school teachers. Thank you!