The Public Relations Officer (PRO) of the National Teaching Council (NTC), Dennis Osei-Owusu, has said that the high failure rate in the 2023 Teacher Licensure Examination is a “national security threat.”
Osei-Owusu stated that the failure rate of teachers who took the re-sit exams is a cause for concern, as it means that many teachers who are yet to join the teaching profession are not fit to be called teachers.
“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,” he stated.
Mr Osei-Owusu was speaking in an interview on Eyewitness News on Citi FM in Accra on Tuesday.
A total of 6,451 (83.5%) teachers failed the 2023 Ghana Teacher Licensure Examination conducted in May 2023.
The results were released by the NTC after the teachers wrote the re-sit papers. The number was out of the 7,728 teachers who participated in the re-sit exams, thus only 1,277 passed.
Osei-Owusu explained that the exams were on three basic areas: numeracy, literacy, and essential skills.
The PRO of the NTC explained that the candidates were not from only the colleges of education but the universities.
“But I can emphatically say some of them are not fit to be called teachers,” he said.
He said that the NTC is working to improve the quality of the exams and to ensure that only qualified teachers are allowed to enter the teaching profession.
