Private schools in the country will be required to employ the services of licensed teachers like the public schools, the Ghana Education Service (GES) has said.

That is to ensure a uniformed standard in both public and private schools.

"Private schools are set up based on the rules and regulations of the Ministry of Education. Now it is part of the ministry’s regulations that to teach in Ghana, you must have a license and they [private schools] cannot be left out once they are providing education to Ghanaian children,” the Chairman of the GES Council, Mr Michael Nsowah, said in an interview with Graphic Online.

Accreditation

He warned that the GES would not grant accreditation to any proprietor who did not employ teachers that are licensed.

“Before approval is given for your operation, you need to give us a list of the teachers you are going to employ to see whether they are licensed,” he said.

Mr Michael Nsowah pointed out that licensing of teachers was backed by law, and that anyone who wanted to teach was required to have a license.

He expressed the hope that once teachers were licensed, it would impact positively on the education right from the basic educational level.

“Any foreigner coming to teach in the country is bound by the law to have a license,” he said, adding that the Private Schools Unit at the GES would be in charge of monitoring the operations of private schools to ensure that they were doing the right thing.

Licensure examination

A total of 28,576 newly trained teachers across the country wrote the first licensure examination which took place between September 10 and 12, 2018.

The examination, among other things, focused on essential skills for teaching, numeracy (basic computation) and literacy (verbal aptitude and essay).

It was held in all the colleges of education in the country except the Christ the Teacher, Akyem Oda Methodist, St Ambrose, McCoy, Cambridge, Jackson and Holy Spirit colleges of education.

The examination aimed to ensure that there are quality teachers to teach children and raise the standard of teaching in country.

It is also to prepare Ghanaian teachers to be accepted globally.

The Education Act of 2008, Act 778, empowers the National Teaching Council to conduct the professional examination for individuals who wanted to take teaching as a profession.