Prez backs cancellation of teacher trainee allowance
President John Dramani Mahama has given full backing to the decision by the Ministry of Education to cancel the payment of the age-old teacher–trainee allowance and replace it with the students’ loan scheme.
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He said the decision, which was taken to ensure uniformity in financing tertiary education, was paying off, with enrolment of students in teacher training institutions going up from 9,000 to 15,000 in the first year.
Addressing students of the University of Education, Winneba (UEW) last Friday as part of his working visit to the Central Region, President Mahama said the imbalances in tertiary education were being addressed.
One critical area, he said, was to reduce the unequal distribution of teachers.
Free senior high school education
Turning to the free senior high school (SHS) education policy announced in his State of the Nation Address on Tuesday, February 25, Mr Mahama said boarding students would partially benefit from it.
In his address to Parliament on Tuesday, the President had said the system would initially benefit day students, but he explained to the UEW students that boarding students would, in the interim, also benefit by paying only feeding and boarding fees, while all others fees would be absorbed by the government.
Mr Mahama said he was unhappy with the situation of graduate unemployment in the country.
“We cannot continue to produce graduates whom industry cannot absorb,” he said.
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To address the problem, he said, a major survey was to be undertaken to establish the skills industry was demanding from graduates for the syllabi to be tailored to meet those needs.
He told the gathering how happy he was to see the fast development of the UEW and gave an assurance that the government would continue to support the university to expand its frontiers.
The Minister of Education, Professor Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang, said the country could not continue to do the same old things in education.
“We need to change to meet current demands,” she said.
She said currently, the emphasis now was on the quality of the products from the universities.
The Vice-Chancellor of the UEW, Professor Akwasi Asabere-Ameyaw, in a welcome address, said the university had invested heavily in Information Technology (IT) for the training of its students.
He expressed concern over the fact that at a time the nation was crying for teachers, thousands of graduate teachers trained with state resources continued to roam the streets with no jobs.