Gov’t Blames Infrastructure Deficit For Reintroduced Colleges of Education Admission Cap

The government has cited inadequate physical infrastructure for the reintroduction of the quota system in public Colleges of Education across the country.

The Ghana Tertiary Education Commission (GTEC) announced a cap on the admission of perspective  teacher trainees in the 2022/2023 academic year in a letter dated December 16.

In the letter to the National Conference of Principals of Colleges of Education (PRINCOF), the Deputy Director-General of the GTEC, Prof Ahmed Jinapor warned the new measure must be “strictly adhered to”.

“For the avoidance of doubt, payment of Feeding Grants and Trainee allowances will be guided by these numbers”, it noted.

The Executive Director for Africa Education Watch (Eduwatch), Kofi Asare in a social media post attributed the reintroduction of the quota system to the government’s inability to afford the teacher trainee allowance.

“CoEs with capacity to admit 450 will now take 290 b’cos gov’t can’t pay trainee allowa for the 450. Even if one opt to forego allowa, still no admission. Yet, we need more trained teachers. We were here before 2014”, he posted on Facebook.

But the Executive Director of GTEC, Professor Mohammed Salifu in an interview debunked the speculations and blamed infrastructural deficit for the decision.

“As far as I’m concerned, there’s no policy change with the reintroduction of the trainee allowances, so that hasn’t been in the equation at all. It hasn’t been one of our considerations, we are dealing with an existing policy which recognises that we pay them [teacher trainees] allowances. But the numbers we are dealing with now are just numbers that are constrained by the physical space that the colleges have,” Citinews quotes him.

He added, “We planned a programme of physical infrastructural expansion, but the expansion hasn’t kept pace with the progress of the cohort. So as it stands now, physical space is still a little limited. You would have heard that we have hostel projects going on across all the various colleges. While that is ongoing, we have to manage the space we have. That is what informed the decision”.

The quota system which had been in existence for decades was scrapped by the Mahama administration in 2013 after the teacher trainee allowance was taken down and replaced with the student loan system to reduce the financial burden on the government.

Source: opemsuo.com/Hajara Fuseini