The Minority in Parliament wants various stakeholders in the education sector to be summoned before the Education Committee of Parliament over the mass failure of teachers in the 2023 licensure examination resit.
The Minority says the National Teaching Council, various Colleges of Education and their affiliates, and the Ghana Education Service ought to brief the Committee on the underlying factors contributing to the failure of the teachers.
Speaking to Citi News in an interview, the Deputy Ranking Member on the Education Committee of Parliament, Dr. Clement Apaak underscored the need to invite the relevant stakeholders on the failure in hopes of addressing the issue.
“The stakeholders in education and the parliamentary sub-committee on education in particular ought to hold a hearing by inviting those charged with preparing teachers which will include the colleges of education, the universities that the various colleges are affiliated to, the National Teaching Council, the Ghana Education Service and the Ministry of Education so that we find out exactly where the problem is and why such a colossal number of teachers failed to pass a licensure exam.”
A total of 6,451 out of 7,728 teachers failed the 2023 Ghana Teacher Licensure Examination conducted in May 2023.
Mass failure a ‘national security threat’ – NTC
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 in an interview on Eyewitness News on Citi FM 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.