Executive Director of Institute for Education Studies (IFEST), Dr Peter Anti, has expressed the need for all and sundry to support the Ghana Teacher Licensure Examination (GTLE).

According to him, the GTLE is supposed to standardize the teaching profession. He revealed that once government is able to control the entry and make sure that “people just don’t walk into the profession”, the profession will be a lot more sanitized.

“…It’s very important for me and most of us as stakeholders in the system. This is how the profession should be managed and that is why I think that we should support this system and ensure it gets all the needed resources so that we are able to keep this. If we are able to keep this for a long period of time, I can assure you that we are sanitizing the teaching profession and very soon fruits of this will be seen by all of us.”
Dr Peter Anti

Justifying his stance, Dr Anti explained that prior to the introduction of the GTLE, people go to colleges of education, graduate and are posted. However, he noted that over time, this has not had any positive outcome on teaching in the classroom.

“That is why I say people should take their time and study the system so that they will appreciate what is happening. Now, if you go through any teacher training institution, when you complete, you are not automatically a teacher and that will also inform us how we are classifying these group of people because they are not teachers who are already in the classroom. They are candidates who want to enter the teaching profession.”
Dr Peter Anti

Relevance of Teacher licensure exams

Furthermore, Dr Anti emphasized that the law now requires that these candidates are registered and licensed by the National Teaching Council and are subsequently tested on numeracy skills, literacy skills and essential skill. Once a candidate passes, he is given a one year probationary period where he is expected to build his portfolio, by being exposed to the classroom situation.

“… You are given a mentor and within that one year, you are monitored to exhibit professional tenets as you exercise the profession. After the one year, you are given a permanent license.”
Dr Peter Anti

Furthermore, Dr Anti indicated that he has been an ardent supporter of the teacher licensure exams, although it faced some opposition at the beginning. He revealed that prior to the teacher licensure exams, the quality of teachers couldn’t be ascertained as prospective teachers graduated from colleges in droves and went to the classrooms without necessarily being validated.

In light of this, he stated that when the teacher licensure exams was introduced, it came with its challenges as they were confronted with legal actions filed against its implementation.

“When we did the educational reforms and passed the education Act in 2008, these are some of the things that were in that document – the National Teaching Council, which was the teacher education unit of the Ghana Education Service that came into being. It was a body setup to regulate the teaching profession… In 2020, the Act was repealed and replaced with Act 10 (23), which sought to empower the National Teaching Council to register teachers and at the same time license them to be able to teach…”
Dr Peter Anti

Meanwhile, the Minority in Parliament has called on stakeholders in the education sector to show up before the Education Committee of Parliament over the mass failure of teachers in the 2023 licensure examination resit.

The Minority revealed that the National Teaching Council, various Colleges of Education and their affiliates, and the Ghana Education Service must brief the Committee on the factors contributing to the failure of the teachers.