Don’t tell us about teacher shortage, what is the solution? – IFEST boss to Education Minister

The Executive Director for the Institute of Education Studies (IFEST) says it is not enough for the Education Minister to list challenges facing his sector without giving details on how government is resolving them.

According to Dr Peter Anti, the challenges within the education sector are already known, hence the need for Dr Yaw Osei Adutwum to highlight the way forward instead of acknowledging them.

This comes on the back of comments made by the Minister during the Ghana Teachers Prize event organized in Takoradi that Ghana does not have a teacher shortage but a deployment challenge.

Addressing the teachers gathered to mark World Teachers Day, Dr Adutwum said the country can boost more trained teachers than most countries in the world.

However, it is the deployment of these trained teachers that must be addressed.

But sharing his opinion on the AM Show, Dr Anti insists there is a shortage of teachers in Ghana.

“If the Minister of Education says we don’t have a shortage of teachers in Ghana, I think that is a little bit erroneous. You have to look at teacher supply in terms of enrollment that we have in the country.

“The standard by the Ghana Education Service and the Ministry of Education is that there should be between 20 and 35 students that should be handled by a teacher in what we call the student-teacher ratio.

“So if we don’t have a shortage of teachers then it means that in every class in Ghana, whether basic school or at the senior high school level the maximum number of students in a class that a teacher is supposed to handle should be 35 at most.

“But that is not the case, we have a class of 75 students being handled by one teacher, and we have classes of 80 and 100 being handled by one teacher.

“In that situation, it becomes a bit more difficult for some of us to agree to the point that we don’t have a teacher shortage,” he argued.

Read also: We don’t have ‘teacher shortage’, we have a distribution challenge – Adutwum

Touching on the assurance from the Education Minister that teachers who accept posting to deprived areas will be paid more and given other benefits, Dr Anti said these incentives have already been promised to the teachers but were not fulfilled.

“When we talk about teacher deployment, that lies at the doorstep of the ministry. It is really a policy issue, nobody in the education sector has the power to deploy teachers except a policy directive from the Education Ministry.

“So if that is the challenge, that he has identified, I ask myself ‘what has he done to ensure that this deployment issue is addressed?’.

“Again, you will have a deployment issue because the very thing that we have put in place to deal with teachers who are supposed to go to rural areas is still not being given to them.

“They are supposed to have 20% of their basic pay being given to them. In terms of promotion, they are to be given special dispensation and other things.

“All these things have not been given to these teachers so when you post a guy to the village or to a deprived area, the maximum that he will stay there will be two years because he looks at his colleagues in Accra and he looks at the opportunities in Accra and he knows if he continuous to stay in that particular place, he will slack behind in terms of his personal development so definitely he will move away,” he added.

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