TVET teachers to ‘compulsory’ write NTC teacher licensure exam

Effective 2023, all Ghana TVET teachers will partake in the Ghana teacher licensure examination (GTLE), David Prah, the Deputy Director General for Operations at the Ghana Technical and Vocational Education and Training Service (TVET) has said.

Speaking at the National Teaching Council (NTC) Research Dissemination event on the rollout of GTLE, the Ghana TVET Director emphasised the importance of the examination to note the characteristics of a good teacher.

“Teacher Licensure Examination is critical to teacher professionalism, and a good teacher is expected to exhibit certain professional characteristics, and so these characteristics are put in the Teacher Licensure Examination,” Prah said.

The research was on, “An Evaluation of the Ghana Teacher Licensure Examination, Quality and Trend Analysis of the Ghana Teacher Licensure Examinations, and Teacher Professionalism and Professional Practice in Ghana

The Registrar of NTC, Christian Addai Poku, on his part said the teacher reforms put in place had made the country more competitive saying Ghana was recognised by the United Kingdom government as one of the four countries in Africa with qualified teachers.

“Ghana was selected by the UK government as one of the four countries in Africa whose teachers are exempt from Qualified Teachers Status (QTS) assessment should they apply to teach in the United Kingdom,” Addai Poku said.

The National Teaching Council’s (NTC) Registrar said the national examination for graduate teachers was a professional one to assess the people venturing into the occupation without living it out in the training institutions.

Mr. Addai-Poku said seven editions of the GTLE had been written, and that the National Council saw the need to conduct a study that would help understand the issues surrounding the policies and influence further reforms.

Introduced in the 2018 academic year, The purpose of the Ghana teacher licensure examination is to ensure that prospective teachers after graduating from the teacher education institutions were filtered through the license exams.

Section 59 of the Education Regulatory Bodies Act, 2020 (Act 1023), also mandates in-service teachers to undergo continuous professional development to improve their skills and to accrue the needed points to renew their license upon expiry.