Save The Teacher Training Colleges From Imminent Collapse, Mr. President!!

Teacher-Training Colleges played and continue to play an uncompromising role towards the delivery of quality education in Ghana. These institutions have the mandate to train and award trainees with certificates and diploma. It's highly challenging to fathom what may have been the student to teacher ratio without the teacher training colleges.

Depending on how development is conceived, the policies taken by the leaders of this country can propel our development good or give birth to an epoch of retard development of our country. Somewhere in our history, education suffered a major setback as a result of inadequacy in the number of trained teachers.

This actually brought about a policy which allowed the Ghana Education Service to engage people who were not trained as teachers. This was a move to take care of the shortage. But just engaging non professional teachers was not the ceiling on solutions to arresting the problem of inadequate teachers in Ghana. Then the idea of instituting allowances for teacher-trainees was thought through and implement.

This was to support many people who were willing to be teachers but had funding challenges. It's also to inspire other people to be trained as teachers. This, by all indications, was a good policy which to a large extent has served its purpose.

About a year ago, the government adopted it as a policy and scrapped the allowances for teacher-trainees. What instigated this move is not strange to all and sundry. Funds to run government business have become hard to come by. As a way to do with the little funds available, government withdrew its financial support to the teacher training colleges.

The decision, according to government was to increased access to teacher-training education. Good speech! Sadly, not even a single block has been added to the facilities in the training colleges. What has become of the funds that were to be allocated to the colleges is not known.

Applications to the teacher training colleges for the new academic year to commence should end by close of May, 2014. The bitter truth however, is that candidates are reluctant to go. The once busy campuses have now become almost ghost institutions. As the consumer will always be rationale, it's now economical to enroll in a university than the teacher training colleges. As Ghanaians are engross in prayers for the gracious Lord to assist the government deliver her promise to the colleges, a purposeful prayer must also be said to prevent the colleges from collapsing.