Increase Intake of Teacher Trainees in Colleges of Education

Dzodze, July 26, GNA - A District Director of Education has called for an urgent consideration for increase in teacher trainee intake in the 38 Colleges of Education to levels about three to four decades ago.

Mr. Felix J.K. Tsevia, in charge of the Ketu North District, called for the withdrawal of the quota system placed on admissions to the colleges to turn out more teachers to feel vacancies in first cycle public schools.

He was addressing a durbar climaxing a week-long Ketu Districts Educational festival, organised by the Ketu Districts Tertiary Students Association (KETSA) under the theme: 93Enhancing the Progress of Ketu through Education", at the weekend at Dzodze.

Mr. Tsevia said lack of adequate numbers of teachers in first cycle public schools particularly the deprived ones as a major drawback to quality reaching and learning and its consequential poor performance of pupils.

Mr. Tsevia, who admitted the quota regime came about as a result of budgetary constrains, cited the Akatsi College, which for example used to admit about 400 students annually, could now admit about 200 out of the over 1,000 applicants.

With his district as a test case, he said of the 350 teacher vacancies in the area including the Kindergarten level in the current academic year, only 71 new teachers were posted to the district.

Mr. Tsevia said the Volta Region was fast loosing its name as the cradle of education and human resource development and appealed for an ambitious approach to arrest the continuing nose dive of the sector in the region.

Mr. Gabriel Kploanyi, Volta Regional Director of Education, represented, called for the doing away with the erroneous impression by people that the path to quality education rests solely on the Government, saying it was a shared responsibility.

Some basic school pupils and schools received book and certificate awards for excellence in quiz competitions organized as part of the celebrations which also included voluntary teaching and sensitization of basic and second cycle students about how to achieve progress in education.