The National Democratic Congress (NDC) Member of Parliament (MP) for Ho West, Emmanuel Kwasi Bedzrah, has urged students of the various colleges of education to embrace the NDC’s pledge to cancel the teacher trainee licensure examination.

He therefore urged them to vote for the party’s Presidential Candidate, former President John Mahama, who has made it a point in his manifesto to cancel the licensure exams introduced by the current New Patriotic Party (NPP) government to certify trainee teachers before posting.

Mr Bedzrah was addressing Amedzofe Teacher Training College (AMECO) 2024 Students’ Representative Council’s (SRC) Thanksgiving Service last Sunday.

He indicated that the introduction of the licensure exams has deprived a lot of trained teachers of opportunities to be automatically posted after their four-year degree courses at respective trainee colleges, adding that the NDC would put a stop to that.

“Those of you who will be completing school will not be made to write the licensure exams before you become a teacher. We noticed that in the past six years, most of your colleagues who completed the degree or diploma programme were not posted because they were told they had not passed the exams. That is not a better Ghana we all want,” he noted.

Approach

The MP for Ho West said: “Your training has put you up to become a teacher; and that's how it's been all these years. For someone to come and say I want you to take an exam only a few people pass, while you've gone through your four-year degree programme that you've passed and say you cannot teach because you have not passed the licensure exams is not the best for us”.

He indicated that the country needed teachers; hence, the NDC’s promise that its next government in January 2025 would ensure that by the end of the fourth year, teacher trainee licensure certificates would be issued to them and automatically posted to teach.