The Africa Education Watch (Eduwatch) has called on the management of the Ghana School of Law to admit the 499 LLB students who have been unfairly denied admission.
Eduwatch stated it notes with disappointment, the unfair treatment meted out to the 499 applicants to the Ghana School of Law by denying them admissions after they passed the entry examinations.
According to Eduwatch, the action by the Ghana School of Law, is an attempt to unfairly impose a quota on the number of admissions and lawyers produced, for no justifiable reason, especially when data from the Labor Market suggests not only a shortage in the supply of lawyers in Ghana, but an increase in their demand.
“We call on the Ghana School of Law to admit the 499 students either as in-person or virtual students, in line with government’s tertiary education policy”.
Eduwatch
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GSL’s action not curbing graduate unemployment
Eduwatch noted that this action of the Ghana School of Law contradicts government’s own agenda of doubling tertiary enrollment by 2030, and creating equal opportunities for career progression and skills development as a means of curbing graduate unemployment.
“How would the Government of Ghana attract more students into tertiary education when graduates from our law faculties, even after passing the Law School’s entrance exams, cannot gain admission to the Ghana School of Law?”
Eduwatch
Eduwatch indicated that over the past ten years, the annual backlog of law faculty graduates who are denied access to professional legal education on the basis of Ghana School of Law’s unfair admission quotas is a key contributor to graduate unemployment in Ghana and a major source of frustration among the youth.
Touching on infrastructure in the law school, Eduwatch noted that, globally, training institutions have adopted virtual learning systems and technologies to sustain and increase access to legal education in the face of limited physical infrastructure and the COVID-19 pandemic effect.
“Should there be genuine concerns regarding limited physical space, the Ministry of Education through the various tertiary institutions have enormous experiences in managing high numbers through virtual schooling initiatives, which should never pose a challenge to the Ghana School of Law adopting to admit the 499 students into a virtual school”.
Eduwatch
Eduwatch therefore urged the Ghana School of Law to develop a virtual learning infrastructure to increase its students intake in successive years. This, it stated, will help run the system simultaneously with on-going brick and mortar expansion strategies.
“We call on His Excellency, the President, to intervene in this act of injustice”.
Eduwatch
Law students exam failure
This statement comes after two thousand LLB candidates who sat for the 2020/2021 academic year Ghana School of Law 2021 Entrance Exams failed the exams. Out of the students from the various law faculties across the country who sat for the exam, only 790 of them passed.
The Ghana Legal Council (GLC), the body in charge of legal education in Ghana has been criticized for this development especially as it applied a new rule requiring candidates to pass 50% in each of the two sections (A and B) of the exam; a rule which did not exist prior to the examination.
