23,000 teaching jobs for grabs

The Ghana Education Service has said there are 22,988 teaching vacancies at the basic education level for this year.

The Deputy Director General of GES Mrs Benedicta Naana Biney said: "Teacher training colleges, which are the main sources of teacher supply for this level of education, will graduate only 8,321 teachers this year."

Mrs Biney said the vacancies were created as a result of retirements, deaths, approval of study leave and withdrawal from the school system.

There are 38 training colleges in the country.

Mrs Biney made this known at a three-day workshop on postings for the newly trained post secondary teachers at Ajumako in the Central region.

Participants drawn from the 10 regions were mainly Assistant Directors of Education in charge of posting. Participants are expected to ensure equitable allocation of trainee teachers in the 10 regions.

She noted that the total demand for teachers over the years has remained very high in relation to supply adding there were serious imbalances between teachers demand and supply.

Giving a breakdown on the trainee teachers' categories produced, Mrs Biney said 7,180 are for general studies, 895 for technical skills and 246 for French.

The Deputy Director General said to ensure equity in teacher allocation to the regions and placement in schools in all the districts, the human resource division had developed guidelines for the exercise.

She expressed concern about the pupil to teacher ratio saying while some were low, others had 90:1 indicating that, it was higher than national pupil teacher ratios

She attributed it to over enrolment.

Mrs Biney stated that a regional posting meeting would be held in May this year to enable the regions to publish teacher allocations and communicate results to all teacher-training colleges by the middle of June.

Source: GNA