Kofi Asare, the executive director of Africa Education Watch, has expressed delight with the 6,451 candidates’ failure in the 2023 Ghana Teacher Licensure Examination that they took in May.

Mr. Asare claims it is the highest since the exam’s commencement, which was created to guarantee trained instructors in Ghanaian schools.

Mr. Asare called attention to some of the scripts’ poor literacy, especially in English. He viewed the failure as a success since it keeps incompetent teachers from training pupils.

“I have seen some of the scripts and there is little to nothing that can be done if graduates cannot string a sentence together in English. We had about 87 per cent or so of them failing in English.
“It is never a failure, it is a good omen for basic education because if you look at the whole issue, licensing teachers was to ensure that professional teaching standards are enhanced. And so if you want to professionalise teaching, you need to raise the bar.”
Kofi Asare

He said that rather than addressing the problem at the tertiary level, purposeful steps must be implemented at the basic level.

As a remedy, Mr. Asare proposed that the National Teaching Council (NTC) set a cap on the number of retakes, recommending a maximum of three.

“We must strengthen the basic level, and strengthen the foundation, then we should be making headways. These kinds of failures cannot be fixed at the tertiary level, these problems are foundational skills deficiencies. And if we want to focus on improving conditional skills at the basic level, especially in literacy and numeracy, I am sure in the long-term, we should be able to fix some of these issues. But for now, I don’t think they are fit to be in the classroom and I am happy that we have separated them from our classrooms.”
Kofi Asare

Mass Failure A ‘National Security Threat’

The high failure rate of the 2023 Teacher Licensure Examination, according to Dennis Osei-Owusu, NTC’s Public Relations Officer (PRO), poses a “national security threat.”

According to Osei-Owusu, the failure percentage of teachers who took the re-sit tests is worrying because it indicates that many teachers who have not yet entered the teaching profession are unqualified to hold the title of teacher.

“This is a national security threat that we need to pay attention to as a country. Some of these teachers have written for the ninth time and others for the second time. We really need to pay attention to this because we are talking about teachers coming to train our future generation. So if a teacher cannot even spell his or her own name then we have something at hand.”
Dennis Osei-Owusu

6,451 teachers, or 83.5%, failed the 2023 Ghana Teacher Licensure Examination, which was held in May 2023.

After the teachers completed the re-sit papers, the NTC announced the results. Only 1,277 teachers who took the examinations again out of 7,728 teachers in total passed.

The tests covered numeracy, literacy, and fundamental abilities, according to Osei-Owusu. The PRO of the NTC clarified that the candidates came from universities as well as colleges of education.

“But I can emphatically say some of them are not fit to be called teachers,” he said.

According to him, the NTC is working to make the exams of higher caliber and to make sure that only qualified teachers are admitted to the teaching profession.