The National Teaching Council (NTC) is following a roadmap to phase out non-professional teachers from Ghana's education system in the near future.

Mr. Christian Addai-Poku, the Executive Director of the Council, who announced this in Kumasi said: "We have a roadmap that we are following to ensure that anybody who teaches a Ghanaian child in both private and public schools must be a trained person".

He was speaking to the media after monitoring the fifth batch of the Ghana Teacher Licensure Examination at the St. Louis College of Education, where hundreds of teachers were sitting for the exams.

About 14,500 newly trained teachers across the country on Sunday wrote the exams, which was originally scheduled for March, this year but was postponed due to the outbreak of the COVID-19.

Mr. Addai-Poku, said it was important to sanitize the system through licensure examination to ensure that all teachers who handled children in schools were fit for purpose.

He said the Council was talking to proprietors of private schools so that in the next few years, such schools would only engage trained teachers to improve teaching standards.

"Anybody coming from a training institution that trains teachers is expected to pass this licensure exam. It will come to a time that a private school may not be able to recruit a non-professional teacher", he emphasized.

He said averagely, about 70 per cent of teachers who had previously written the exams had been successful, adding that, those who failed to make the grade were given opportunities to re-sit.

The Council, he noted, was committed to improving teaching standards in the country by ensuring that teachers were licensed before they could be inducted into the profession.