Education think tank, Africa Education Watch, has raised concerns about what it says is the inadequate and unfair distribution of trained teachers to parts of the country.
According to the group, the situation is contributing greatly to the poor teaching and learning outcomes, particularly at the basic level.
Speaking on the Citi Breakfast Show on Wednesday, Executive Director of Africa Education Watch, Kofi Asare admitted that although Ghana requires more teachers, the perception of a shortage of trained teachers in the country is erroneous.
He explained that there has been an over-concentration of teachers in urban areas to the detriment of students in rural education, adding that it is simply not the lack of adequate teacher supply but rather more of a distribution problem.
“The impression has been created that we don’t have enough teachers in Ghana and that we have to increase the number of teachers we have to be able to provide every student with a teacher. It is true that we need teachers. But the fact is that we have a lot of teachers that are surplus to manpower requirement in many regions.”
“The teachers we are producing from our colleagues are not distributed equitably. Teachers are being overpopulated in urban areas and underpopulated in rural and peri-urban areas. So you go to a municipality and there are excess teachers, and you go to a district, there are no teachers”, Mr. Asare added.
For him, there are thousands of public primary school classrooms in rural Ghana without teachers, causing an average of 30 dropouts daily.
He cited for example that Adentan municipality has only 18 public primary schools with 140 classrooms, arguing that it requires at least 140 primary class teachers plus 18 heads, making 158 to function.
However, Adentan has 363 teachers, a surplus of 20.
Other areas
Kumasi Metro has 98 public primary schools with 820 classrooms. Kumasi requires 820 primary class teachers and 98 heads to operate, totalling 918.
However, Kumasi has 1,208 primary teachers, a surplus of 290.
“Teacher rationalization in Adentan and Kumasi alone can provide about 500 teachers to fill empty primary school classrooms in rural Ghana immediately without any cost to the state. What is required is the political will to decongest urban schools and redistribute to where teachers are needed”, the Executive Director of Africa Education Watch added.
Per his analysis, the situation in Mafi Dugame JHS in Central Tongu is no different. Only one teacher handles an entire school.
“So if we are able to rationalize teacher deployment and ensure that we have a more equitable system to deploy teachers based on the number of classrooms in schools, we will be able to distribute that we have more adequately without the government having to increase the number of teachers before we achieve this”, Mr. Asare suggested.
On his part, Convener of Coalition Against Privatization and Commercialization of Education (CAPCOE), Richard Kwashie Kovey stressed the need for gaps in Ghana’s educational systems to be addressed.
“We have not paid attention to basic education in the country all these years. That is the fact. Before a student leaves school, he or she should be able to know what is next, but people leave university and do not know what to do because of the foundation. The resources and facilities are not there for them to explore. We need to get support so that we are able to solve the now, or else it will become something that we cannot contain.”
