According to him, the process of licensing teachers unfairly denies qualified teachers employment opportunities, hence the need for it to be scrapped.
This follows a campaign promise by the party’s flagbearer, John Dramani Mahama, that the new NDC government will cancel the Teacher Licensure Examination, written by trained teachers as a requirement to get a license to teach.
This, Sammy Gyamfi stated, has become a tool to control the number of teachers employed annually, causing frustration among qualified educators.
Speaking on Metro TV, on Thursday, November 23, 2023, Sammy Gyamfi pointed out the irony of the government recruiting NABCO graduates, who lack professional teaching training, to teach children, while side-lining qualified teachers who have undergone extensive training in colleges of education.
“The situation has gotten so bad that today, people who have completed school for four years are sitting home with no jobs yet, they have the Bachelors of Education and some of them are compelled to even bribe the officials of the National Teaching Council, all in an effort to get a mere license. They are sitting at home.
“Yet, this is the same government that recruited graduates under their NABCO program - people who have no professional training in teaching, they recruited them and gave them the opportunity to teach our children. NABCO people were teaching our children, yet those who have gone to colleges of education for four years, passed all their courses, about 50-60 of them, passed their internship and also passed their various support teaching in school for examinations or assessments, cannot teach? What kind of injustice is this? All because you want to suppress the numbers,” he stated.
Gyamfi emphasized that the examination lacks transparency, with no clear marking scheme or known pass mark, allowing the government to control the number of teachers granted employment each year.
“To be a licensed teacher, you need to write an examination on three things: numeracy, literacy and pedagogy; an examination with no competitive guide. An examination whose marking scheme remains a mystery as we speak today, even the pass mark is not known. The pass mark is whimsically and capriciously adjusted based on the number of people this government wants to deny employment. In reality, that is what this entire licensure examination is about,” he added.
He further criticized the Teacher Licensure Examination, describing it as a deceptive scheme orchestrated by the government to limit the employment of qualified teachers.
“It is a ruse, a scheme calculated by the failed Akufo-Addo/NPP government to deprive qualified teachers of employment. They have failed to create vacancies, expand educational infrastructure. They don't have the money to employ all the teacher trainee graduates we are churning out from the various colleges of education. So, they have come up with this trick of a licensure exam so that every year, should 50,000 teachers graduate, they will make them write the exams. If they have money to employ only 10, 000 people, they will fail 30,000 and only 10,000 people will be told that they have passed,” he added.
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Communications Officer for the NDC, Sammy Gyamfi