President of NAGRAT Christian Addai Poku insists the new policy doesn’t favour teachers.
“Even as we speak the new policy is that when they complete College of Education they will have to apply for appointment or employment as teachers.
“And so even if you open up for everybody to become teachers and eventually they don’t get employment as teachers they you have not done anything,” he said.
“Hitherto within they had the quota system they measure the number of teachers would need in the system in the next three years and they then admit them into the College of Education to be trained. So as you are undergoing the training the assumption is that by the time you come out, there is vacancy for you to fill.
But if you have scrapped the allowances that they took to motivate a lot of people to join the service and you have replaced it with a loan you haven’t not done any teacher friendly policy,” he explained.
He also dismissed claims by government that the intake of teachers has increased.
If you have expanded intake are you also expanding employment such that all the people that will come out of the College of Education in the next two or three years will have employment as teachers? he asked.
He was convinced that within the next few years if a trained teacher completes the College of Education there is no guarantee he or she is going to get a job.
But, Deputy Education Minister Alex Kyeremeh has defended government’s new policy.
He said when the Colleges of Education were upgraded into Tertiary institutions the Teacher allowance policy was scrapped so that the trainees will like, any other tertiary student take a loan to pay back.
“We are not implementing any anti-teacher policy,” he said, adding in one year the number of teacher trainees has increased from 9,000 to 16,000 as a result of the policies the government has introduced.
Government has defended its decision for graduate teachers to apply for employment.
The National Association of Graduate Teachers is kicking against the idea accusing government of implementing anti teacher policies.
Government scrapped the teacher trainee allowances and introduced loans for the trainees.
