Over 80% of teachers who wrote the 2023 Ghana Teacher Licensure Examination in May have failed their exams.
This follows the release of the exam results by the National Teachers Council.
It was revealed that out of 7728 candidates who sat to write the paper, 6451 candidates did not pass the exams, making up 83.5% of the candidates.
Only 1277 of the candidates were confirmed to have passed.
This is the highest rate of failure ever recorded in the examination since its inception.
In an interview with Citi News, Public Relations Officer for the National Teachers Council, Mr. Dennis Osei-Owusu described the mass failure as a major security threat to the nation’s education sector.
He expressed disappointment in the results of the teachers, as he questioned their capabilities as teachers.
“It’s a national security threat, we are having people going to the classrooms to teach our future generations and if I tell you the kind of things some of them wrote, you ask the kind of training they had in their various training institutions before they got here. Everything shows that most of them are not ready to be teachers, they just want to explore the system.”
Mr. Osei-Owusu however explained that another chance would be given to teachers who failed the exams to redeem themselves.
Meanwhile, Executive Director of Africa Education Watch, Kofi Asare has commented on the mass failure, describing it a call to ensure professionalism of teachers.
“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 professionalize teaching, you need to raise the bar.”
Kofi Asare suggested some measures that could be employed to address the failure of teachers at the basic level.
“We must strengthen the basic level and strengthen the foundation then we should be making headways. 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.”
The 2023 Ghana Teacher Licensure Examination is a professional examination that is taken by teachers to certify their qualification as teachers in the classrooms.
