Thursday, 28 March

Teacher licensure exam set for March 25, 26

Education
The National Teaching Council (NTC) has set 25 and 26 March 2019 as dates for the second teacher licensure exam.

According to the NTC, 15,000 trainee teachers are expected to take the exam, including those who could not take part in the maiden one as well as the over 7,000 trainees who failed.

Registration for the 25 and 26 March exams began on Friday, 8 March.

New applicants for the examination are expected to pay GHS220 and those re-sitting are expected to pay GHS220 for three papers, and GHS100 for a paper.

Over 28,000 newly-trained teachers sat for the first-ever teacher licensure examination on Monday, 10 September 2018.

The examination, which was held in all the colleges of education in the country except Christ the Teacher, Akim Oda Methodist, St. Ambrose, McCoy, Cambridge, Jackson and Holy Spirit Colleges of Education, sought to ensure that only qualified teachers were employed to teach, as a way of improving the standard of teaching.

The licensure exams were met with stiff resistance from some newly-trained teachers but the Ghana Education Service (GES) and the National Teaching Council (NTC) insisted anyone who wanted to be hired by the GES after training, wrote it.

Out of the 28,757 teachers who wrote the first examination, 21,287, representing 74 per cent passed, while 7,432 failed.

The results of 26 candidates were withheld pending the completion of investigations into their alleged involvement in examination malpractices while 12 had their entire results cancelled.

Meanwhile, the immediate-past deputy general secretary of the Trainee Teachers Association of Ghana (TUTAG), Mr Ekow Painstil Gyan, told Accra-based Citi FM on Monday, 11 March 2019 that the mass failure was expected.

“You saw that we raised a lot of concerns about the mode of assessment for the examination, especially when no material was available or no material was provided for candidates to read before they wrote the examinations, and, so, it was clear, we saw it coming that a lot of people were going to fail.

“And even if you contact others, you’ll note that those who failed the examinations are students or people who studied, who read early childhood and if you go to college and learn more about early childhood, you don’t learn anything about mathematics, yet they brought mathematics questions for those who studied early childhood and even those who studied French to answer”.

In his view, the NTC should “consider its modalities for setting this licensure examination questions”, adding: “You can’t ask someone to go and sit down without giving that person a course outline to study, no it is wrong”.


Source: Ghana/ClassFMonline.com/91.3FM

Source: Elikem Adiku