Kofi Asare, the executive director of Africa Education Watch, has expressed satisfaction with the 6,451 candidates’ failure in the 2023 Ghana Teacher Licensure Examination that they took in May.
Mr. Asare claims it is the highest since the exam’s commencement, which was created to guarantee qualified teachers in Ghanaian schools.
Kofi Asare brought attention to the scripts’ weak literacy skills, notably in English, during an interview on Citi FM. He viewed the failure as a success since it keeps incompetent teachers from training pupils.
“I have seen some of the scripts and there is little to nothing that can be done if graduates cannot string a sentence together in English. We had about 87 per cent or so of them failing in English.
“It is never a failure, it is a good omen for basic education because if you look at the whole issue, licensing teachers was to ensure that professional teaching standards are enhanced and so if you want to professionalise teaching, you need to raise the bar.”
He said that rather than addressing the problem at the tertiary level, purposeful steps must be implemented.
“We must strengthen the basic level, and strengthen the foundation then we should be making headways. These kinds of failures cannot be fixed at the tertiary level, these problems are foundational skills deficiencies and if we want to focus on improving conditional skills at the basic level, especially in literacy and numeracy, I am sure in the long-term, we should be able to fix some of these issues but for now, I don’t think they are fit to be in the classroom and I am happy that we have separated them from our classrooms.”
As a solution, Mr Asare suggested that the National Teaching Council (NTC) should limit the number of times a person can retake the exam, proposing a maximum of three re-sits.
