A university lecturer and former Upper East Regional Minister, Professor Avea Nsoh has defended the rationale behind Ghana’s teacher licensure examinations, arguing that the policy was introduced to professionalize teaching but requires significant reforms.
Speaking in a phone interview on Dreamz FM’s Breakfast Today program, Professor Avea said the licensure system was modeled after certification processes used in professions such as medicine and law to ensure standards and accountability.
“The whole nation depends on the teacher,” he said. “So the idea was to regulate them, license them and certify them so we know who is qualified.”
The licensure exams were introduced in 2018 under the New Patriotic Party (NPP) government as a requirement for trained teachers to be certified for practice. However, the policy has remained controversial, with opposition voices promising to cancel it.
Prof. Avea, who said he was part of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) manifesto team, clarified that the party’s position on “cancellation” refers to restructuring the system rather than abolishing teacher licensing entirely.
“What we are cancelling is the current format, where teachers write a one-hour or two-hour exam after years of training,” he explained. “We want to align it with their training and assess them over time in the classroom.”
He argued that assessing teachers through a single exam after several years of study is unfair and does not accurately reflect their competence.
“If someone has gone through three or four years of training and is certified by their lecturers, it is not fair to judge them based on one exam,” he said.
Instead, Prof. Avea proposed integrating licensing into teacher training programs and supplementing it with continuous, field-based assessments conducted during professional practice.
He added that such an approach would better track teacher performance and improve classroom outcomes.
The professor also acknowledged that the term “cancellation” may have been misinterpreted in political discourse but insisted that the intent was always to reform the system.
