One hundred and twenty pupil teachers sacked in the Upper Manya Krobo District are still on the Ghana Education Service’s (GES) payroll and receive their salaries every month.
Investigations by the Ghana News Agency (GNA) revealed that the district is not faced with teacher deficit, rather the 120 sacked teachers falsified their documents.
The indication is that, the district has enough teachers despite the absence of the 120 pupil teachers and that most of the pupil teachers recruited were in excess of the number of teachers needed.
It would be recalled that the GNA Media Auditing and Development Tracking Project team, sponsored by Star-Ghana with focus on developmental journalism, published that 120 pupil teachers in the district who faked their documents had been sacked.
According to the report, teachers with as low as Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) certificates had presented false documents and were recruited into the Ghana Education Service (GES) as pupil teachers in the district.
However, Mr Tetteh Angmor, the District Chief Executive (DCE), was of the view that despite the indication that the district had enough teachers, sacking of 120 pupil teachers undoubtedly would affect classes.
He said in his view, considering the population of the various schools, the teachers might seem enough but, the teacher-school ratio was affecting performance and supervision.
According to Mr Angmor, the district had made formal request to the GES for more teachers.
He observed that, the deprived nature of the district was making it difficult for teachers to accept postings to the communities and so the assembly had been supporting the teachers to acquire decent accommodation to serve as incentive to attract teachers to the district.
Source: GNA