The Ghana National Council of Private Schools (GNACOPS) in collaboration with theNational Teaching Council (NTC), yesterday rolled out a training programme for private school teachers to enhance their professionalism.

Dubbed ‘Private School Teachers Continuous Professional Development (PST-CPD)’ the programme, launched in Accra seeks to train 48 master trainers who would later train 20,000 private school teachers across the country.

The four-day training programme with facilitators drawn from University of Cape Coast (UCC) and the University ofEducation Winneba (UEW) would be held on Saturdays and Sundays for two weeks,due to the busy schedule of both facilitators and master trainers.

The pilot programmeis on the theme:“Preparing Private School Teachers into Teaching Profession through Teacher Competency Training for Quality Teaching in Ghana.”

The master trainers would be trained on literacy and numeracy content to help improve the teaching standard in the country.

Speaking at the launch, the Registrar of NTC, Dr Christian AddaeOpoku, explained that the rollout of the programme was vital as it would provide untrained teachers the pedagogy needed to deliver onquality.

Dr. Opokusaid despite the importance of the programme, it did not guarantee participants to teach, adding that “it is however in consonance with NTC’s requirement that all in-service teachers both private and public schools undertake periodic training to ensure quality delivery of lessons to learners.”

According to him, the pilot training programme could in the near future, form the basis for the issuance of a temporary licence for all unqualified teachers, and therefore urged them to take steps to upgrade themselves by attending training programmes.

He hinted that his outfit would from next year, enter into the enforcement stage of the teacher licensing law,and therefore entreated all qualified teachers, especially, private schools to apply for the teacher’s licence.

For his part, the Executive Director of GNACOPS, Mr Enoch Kwasi Gyetuah, commended the Ministry of Education (MoE) and the Ministry of Finance(MoF) for extending its teaching training programme to private school.

Mr Gyetuah explained that the training programme would impact private school teachers positively, as it would enhance their competencies and also boost their confidence to deliver to the task.

He noted that the training programme would be carried out at 24 centres across the country.

As a way of sustaining teachers after the training, Mr. Gyetuah said that GNACOPS had developed the Child Education Support Scheme to ensure that monitoring of the programme was achieved, and also provide insurance cover for teachers.

One of the facilitators, Mr. Seth Kofi Nti from the University of Cape Coast said they had selected topics vital for their work,and that the four days was enough for them

A master trainer at the programme, Mr. Samuel Kakra Boamah said he expected to acquire in-depth knowledge from experienced facilitators which would be transferred to other teachers to improve teaching and learning.