THE Ghana Education Service (GES) and the Ghana National Education Campaign Coalition (GNECC) are in disagreement over the number of teachers in basic schools in the country. While the GES says there is no such shortage, the GNECC says there is a shortage of 24,000 teachers in basic schools, a figure arrived at following a research conducted in 2006 by the coalition. The Director-General of the GES, Samuel Bannerrnan -Mensah, responding to the issue of shortage of teachers in an interview, said there are more teachers in the system, particularly in the urban areas compared to the rural areas. He said there is therefore the need to transfer some teachers to the rural areas where their services are needed. Mr Bannerman-Mensah said: "Since the GES is not aware of the criteria the GNECC used to conduct the research and arrived at this figure, I cannot comment on it." He explained that there are adequate numbers of teachers in the system and challenged the GNECC to give details of its research on the shortage of teachers to guide the GES to address the issue. When contacted the National Programme Officer of the Coalition, Kofi Asare, insisted that there is shortage of teachers in the system. He pointed out that pupil teacher, national service personnel and the National Youth Employment Programme, teaching assistants who the GES engaged in classrooms are not trained teachers. Mr Asare said these categories of personnel are volunteers. "The coalition in October 2006 conducted a research on teacher deployment in quality basic education delivery and arrived at the figures and copies of the research report have been given to the GES and the education ministry," he said. Source: The Ghanaian Times