The National Teaching Council (NTC) organized GTLE awards committee meeting on Tuesday, 29th June, 2021. The Hon. Deputy Minister of Education, Hon. Rev. John Ntim Fordjour addressed the gathering by reiterating the need to Professionalize Teaching in Ghana and also commended the Council in executing its mandate very well, most especially in the conduct of Ghana Teacher Licensure Examination which saw its successful sixth sitting on the 6th and 7th of May, 2021 conducted in 26 centres across the country. He talked on the need to examine Pre-Service Teachers on numeracy, “as a teacher you should be able to have basic knowledge in numeracy skills and I support the National Teaching Council in considering numeracy as an assessment area in licensing our teachers who are yet to join the teaching service”. The whole world has come to a consensus that “education is an effective tool in turning around the economy, if that is so then the teacher is at the centre of such a great development in spinning this ideology”.

The world at large has become a global village which has given birth to a lot of inventions; young men across the globe are having a lot of inventions to their credit and Ghanaian children should be able to compete with them, all these can come to fruition when we have the best of teachers who believe in the current best practices as far as education is concern. Professionalizing teaching is a good call and all teachers should embrace it.

The Honorable Deputy Minister therefore charged the Council to look at certain critical areas which will help improve on the learning outcome of our pre-service teachers. Previous outcome of the GTLE shows that there is always an abysmal performance in literacy and the council must pay attention to helping teachers in that bracket.

The Registrar of NTC, Dr. Christian Addai-Poku in his opening remarks made mention of how the Council did its best in implementing most of the recommendations made by the awards Committee in the previous meeting held before the release of the 5th GTLE results. He further stated that the Council will continue to carry out the necessary reforms to ensure the credibility and relevance of the GTLE. One of such changes that are imminent is the introduction of constructed responses to the Essential Professional Skills paper in the coming exams possibly in next year. There is also an ongoing talk about total reforms on the content and structure of the entire examination. For a start a study is being commissioned by the Council, with support from T-TEL, to evaluate the GTLE and make recommendations. He took the opportunity to congratulate all the stakeholders in making the 6th GTLE incident-free.