Africa Education Watch, an influential education think tank, is advocating for the implementation of a limit on the number of attempts allowed for candidates taking the Ghana Teacher Licensure Examination. This call comes as a response to concerns surrounding the current examination system and aims to enhance its effectiveness and fairness.

This comes after the National Teaching Council revealed that some of the 6,000 candidates who failed the 2023 resit examination had taken the exam on nine previous occasions.

The Executive Director for Africa Education Watch, Kofi Asare, told Citi News that the Licensure Examination would ensure that professional teaching standards are enhanced.

“The policy is a great one, and it is a means of separating the boys from the men for a want of a better word and ensuring that teachers who do not have the minimum competence to teach even though have their degrees are not allowed to teach.

“Moving forward, I think the National Teaching Council should put a cap on the number of times one can do a resit and I think that the maximum number of resit that should be permissible should be three.”

Meanwhile, the Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT) is also calling for a stakeholder dialogue to identify the gaps and propose solutions to curb the annual persistent failure, which is worsening over the years.

“The issue requires a national dialogue, and we need to find out what is the issue because we have been here before, and it was business as usual, but for me, I don’t think it should be business as usual, and we all need to come together and bring all the regulatory bodies on board to find out what it is that we are not doing right.”