Maintain high TTC grade

The recent policy to upgrade teacher training has come with challenges to students and colleges. The Ministry of Education and the Teachers Service Commission (TSC) set higher entry grades for diploma in teacher education that will eventually become the minimum qualification to teach at pre-primary, primary and secondary school levels.

But with the policy, implemented in 2021, few students have made the grade, leaving out thousands of others who would have wished to pursue a teaching career. Teacher training colleges (TTCs) are under-enrolled, making some stakeholders to call for the lowering of grades to qualify more students.

If the government gives in to such demands, however, it will roll back the original purpose of having better-trained teachers, in tandem with global trends and best practice. It is in the interest of all that we have highly qualified teachers to shepherd the young ones into a future that is full of complex technological advancements and innovations.

Lowering TTC entry grades will not achieve that. Instead, the government should look for ways of making teaching attractive to the youth and not one for those who don’t qualify for other professions. It also should come up with ways of taking care of the interests of unemployed teachers holding the certificate in teacher education (P1), which is being phased out.

Such teachers will be hugely disadvantaged competing with diploma holders for jobs. As such, there is a need to upgrade their skills through extra training, at a fair cost, to bring them to the diploma level. This is crucial, considering the many misgivings about the implementation of the competency-based curriculum (CBC). Teachers have not escaped blame, where many feel that they lack proper pedagogical skills for CBC.

It is the objective and expectation of all that better-trained teachers will bring better delivery of content in the classroom.