Teachers In The Upper Manya-Krobo District Were Only Collecting Salaries Without Teaching

One hundred and twenty pupil teachers sacked in the Upper Manya Krobo District are still on the Ghana Education Service�s (GES) pay roll and receive their salaries every month. Ghana News Agency (GNA) investigation report said the district is not faced with teacher deficit, rather the 120 sacked teachers falsified their documents, not going to their respective schools to teach but only had their names on GES�s pay roll. 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 ideal number of teachers needed by the district. 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 various school�s population, the teachers might seemed enough but in reality, the teacher-school ratio was affected citing instances where three teachers were manning classes one-to six in a school at the district. According to Mr Angmor, the district had made formal request to the GES for more teachers and hoped that it would be considered. 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.