Education think-tank, Africa Education Watch, has reiterated calls for the scrapping of the teacher trainee allowance following the revelation that the government is seeking to cut admission into Colleges of Education by 30% due to lack of funds.
The Ghana Tertiary Education Council(GREC) gave the directive to the various Colleges of Education to initiate a cut in admission.
Speaking to Starr News, Programmes Manager for Africa Education Watch, Divine Kpe insists the policy has outlived its usefulness hence the need to scrap it completely.
“I’ve all the time made the point that trainees allowance we don’t need it. It becomes at this point non expedient, it is not something that we needed to use to attract more teachers into the field. Already there are more teachers in the field and now the colleges are degree awarding institutions unlike previously where they were Teachers Certificate “A” and it came to Diploma so there’s even some sort of incentive for people to enroll in Colleges of Education because you know that when I graduate I’m going to be awarded the same degree as someone who attended the university.”
“This policy has outlived its usefulness, as I said it is more politically expedient at this point to say you want to maintain the allowance. It is not a sound policy to continue and we have seen government struggling to continue paying this allowance. Annually, we spend about GHC250 million on average feeding adults in colleges of education when in essence they could even have gotten the opportunity to access students loan that could even give them higher than the allowance they get. We don’t need to put ourselves in this situation where we want to stick to feeding adults in colleges of education and therefore we have to limit people’s chances of getting into colleges of education. It is not right,” Divine Kpe added.