I went for a wedding in Kumasi few weekends ago. I left on Thursday night and arrived at Friday dawn. In the morning of Friday, one of my sisters, a trained nurse, came to me and said she was leaving for work.
She was in a casual dress and I asked her why she was not in her uniform. Then she said she manages a business for a certain woman who lives outside the country. Then I asked her the obvious question and she was like, “I haven’t been posted yet.” She completed school in 2023 and we are in 2026.
In Ghana, we have nursing and teacher trainee colleges that train people to become nurses and teachers. Over two decades ago, when I was in secondary school, a teacher trainee friend doing her teaching practice advised me to study nursing after school.
Her reason was not because I had any passion for the profession, but because jobs were readily available in that field. According to her, pursuing nursing meant I wouldn’t be job hunting like other graduates after school. And, she was right. The same applied to teacher trainees. Nurses and teachers didn’t have to look for jobs. But I had no passion for healthcare, so I didn’t take her advice.
The question, however, is; will the same advice I was given some years ago still hold today? Are jobs readily available for trained teachers and nurses? Or they now do hunt for jobs after their training? Although the issue in question applies to both personnel undertaking training in teaching and nursing, for the purposes of this piece, I’ll limit it to teacher trainees.
Overview of Pupil-Teacher-Ratio (PTR) in Ghana
According to a review of progress by the Africa Education Watch for Teacher Deployment in Ghana’s Basic Schools, conducted between 2022 and 2025, Ghana fell short on its targets for the benchmarks it set for the sector.
The PTR, a critical indicator of teacher adequacy and teaching quality, generally has lower PTRs corresponding to smaller class sizes, personalised instruction, and improved learning outcomes.
According to the Eduwatch report, the Education Sector Medium-Term Development Plan (ESMTDP) (2022-2025) sets PTR targets of 31:1 at Kindergarten (KG), 31:1 at Primary, and 11:1 at Junior High School (JHS). These targets, the report noted, are “relevant for the deployment of effective learner-centered pedagogy under Ghana’s Standards-Based Curriculum.”
However, implementation under the medium-term has fallen short of these benchmarks, with national data for the 2023/2024 academic year (three years into the four-year medium term), reporting PTRs of approximately 45:1 at KG, 39:1 at Primary, and 20:1 at JHS, which are all significantly above target levels.
Key aspects of the teacher deficit
The report listed four key factors contributing to this teacher deficit in the classrooms.
- Massive shortage: Executive Director of Eduwatch, Kofi Asare, has said in an interview on Channel One TV on Tuesday, January 13, 2026, while assessing the one-year performance of President John Dramani Mahama, that the education sector requires at least 15,000 new teachers each year to maintain balance in the system. However, he stated that no teachers were recruited in 2025, worsening an already strained situation.
“As a result, we now have not less than 30,000 classrooms without teachers, and the number could be higher,” he indicated.
- Recruitment challenges: The country is also faced with the challenge of recruiting teachers despite having a large pool of trained teachers, due to bureaucratic hurdles. Usually, there are delays in financial clearance, coupled with administrative bottlenecks preventing the employment of qualified teachers, leaving many schools in the country understaffed.
- Teacher attrition: Many trained teachers in the country are leaving the profession to seek better-paying jobs and more prestigious careers. This turnover is largely due to poor remuneration and low prestige associated with teaching, making it challenging for the sector to retain its trained and experienced talents.
- Rural-urban imbalance: Due to obvious reasons such as the lack of adequate infrastructure and social amenities in many deprived areas in Ghana, many qualified teachers reject postings to these areas, and often prefer to work in the urban centres, leading to a shortage in these rural and remote locations.
The recruitment controversy in Ghana
On Wednesday, November 12, 2025, Ghanaians were made to attach a familiar adjective –-black-– to the day, due to the tragic story that unfolded in the early hours of that fateful day. During a Ghana Armed Forces recruitment exercise at the El-Wak Sports Stadium in Accra, six applicants lost their lives, and 28 others suffered varying degrees of injuries in a stampede that occurred at the venue.
Over 500,000 Ghanaian youth applied for the 2026 security service roles in the Police, Immigration, Prisons and Fire Services, but only 5,000 spots were available for the 105,000 people that qualified.
These statistics exclude the Ghana Armed Forces (GAF) because it is managed by the Ministry of Defence, while the other security agencies mentioned earlier operate a centralised exercise for agencies under the Ministry of the Interior.
These figures, experts have argued, are not inspired by the passion to serve but the lack of jobs in the country. After people losing their lives and many being rejected the opportunity to train to join the security services, we woke up to yet another recruitment brouhaha, this time around, not persons who are applying to be trained to become professionals, but rather, those the government has already spent taxpayers’ money to train.
The introduction of this piece makes it clear that completing teacher training does not guarantee one a readily market to fit in. You need to wait for some years before you get recruited. And according to these unemployed trained teachers, once it gets to the turn of a particular year-group to be employed, the system absorbs all available trained personnel in that particular year.
However, the situation is not the same this time around. When the Ghana Education Service (GES) opened the portal for people to apply for the 2026 postings, 40,000 trained and licensed teachers did, out of which the Ministry of Finance gave clearance for only 7,000 to be employed. Where should the remaining applicants go?
Impact on education
The government’s refusal to employ these trained teachers in the various schools adversely impacts education in the country, which consequently will affect the future of this nation. It brings increased workload on the existing teachers, declines the quality of education, particularly in rural areas where professional teachers refuse postings, and further breeds educational inequality, especially in the villages where pupils lack access to some basic resources.
The political dancing-chairs with Ghana’s training institutions
Ghana’s political landscape has been inundated with freebie promises from politicians who know such promises resonate with many of the electorates than giving them economic empowerment to cater for themselves. It is for this reason that the “I’ll provide free this, free that” dominate campaign promises during elections.
In 2013, John Dramani Mahama promised to cancel the teacher and nursing trainee allowances, which he did in 2014. Some of us commended him for that because, it was the boldest political decision any government could make since the introduction of the allowance for the trainees over some six decades ago.
This policy was first introduced by Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah in the 1960s to increase enrollment in the teacher training institutions. This was because the field was not attractive to many youths, and for that reason, Nkrumah introduced it to serve as a crucial incentive to encourage young people to pursue teaching. It was also to support needy students at the training to cater for some expenses while in school.
However, after promising to cancel the allowance, President Mahama in 2016, at the dying minutes of the electioneering period, turned around to pay the allowance to these trainees. This was because his opponent had promised to restore it and for the fear of losing votes, he licked back his own spittle on the ground.
Lo and behold, President Akufo-Addo restored the allowance in 2017, a campaign promise that helped him to win votes, which he fulfilled but failed to execute its implementation to the core.
What’s the essence of the colleges if we can’t absorb their products afterwards?
The question is; why should we have Colleges of Education if we can’t employ their students after training them? What would really be the sense in spending taxpayers’ money to train people and make them sit at home in the end? President Nkrumah introduced the allowance because people were not attending teacher training colleges.
As a result, it was meant to incentivise them to be trained as teachers. Now people are clamouring for admission, so what’s the sense in still keeping the allowance, which could have been saved, invested and used to employ these same teachers by the time they complete the training?
Following reports that only 7,000 out of the 40,000 trained teachers that applied for this year’s postings could be absorbed by the government, the Teacher Trainees’ Association of Ghana (TTAG) called for the shutting down of these colleges if the situation is going to remain the same.
Nanija Devine, President of TTAG, had said at a press conference at the Association’s national secretariat on Wednesday, April 22, 2026, that: “Those currently in the Colleges of Education are over 65,000. If the 45,000 already in the system do not know when they will be posted, then what about those still in training? What is the essence of their education?” he quizzed, adding that “if indeed the government cannot recruit the 45,000 trained teachers in the system, then the Colleges of Education should consider closing down.”
A time to redirect the allowance to reduce the unemployed trained teachers
In the 2026 Budget statement presented by the Finance Minister, Dr. Cassiel Ato Baah Forson, in Parliament on Thursday, November 13, 2025, the Government made an allocation of GH¢207 million for teacher trainee allowances. It also included a GH¢474 million for nursing trainee allowances. Don’t forget trained nurses are also unemployed.
The GH¢207 million allocated for the teacher trainee allowance, could employ pproximately 5,000 new teachers for an entire year.
An analytical policy critique by the African Foundation for Educational Development (AFFED) says the Ghana Education Service’s (GES) Single Spine Salary Structure has an entry-level monthly salary for newly posted diploma-holding teachers starting with a gross of around GH¢2,732, while degree holders start around GH¢3,459.
On average, together with SSNIT, it costs the State around GH¢35,000 to GH¢41,500 annually for an entry-level teacher. Dividing GH¢207,000,000 by an average annual employment cost of GH¢41,500 yields exactly 5,000 teachers.
Why can’t we invest this money at the beginning of every academic year? By the time they finish their training in four years, how much could have been realized to absorb these teachers who are staying at home?
Conclusion
If there is one thing I’m certain of, it is the fact that the Ghanaian politician’s interest is where they can get their earliest reward and not what the future holds for the younger generation. It is for this reason that the New Patriotic Party (NPP) introduced the Free SHS policy and the National Democratic Congress (NDC) coming up with the No Fee Stress policy.
Clearly, the beneficiaries of these two policies are either in their voting age or would be eligible in the nearest election to come. So, the objective is for political parties to use these policies as bait to win their votes, leaving the basic level which requires the most important attention to suffer.
To summarise the whole issue; Government established teacher training colleges to train instructors for our basic schools. People were not interested. So, incentives were introduced to motivate people to enroll. It got to a time that application for enrollment went up.
Government abolished the incentive and rather opted to give student loans. But due to politics, these allowances were reintroduced. Now, after spending money to train these teachers, government cannot employ them. They are staying at home. Meanwhile, our schools need teachers and the political twist has always been to look busy, sound caring and ignore the real issues.
Free SHS is undoubtedly a brilliant policy. No fee stress isn’t a bad programme as well, just as the teacher trainee allowance. But all these policies are geared towards beneficiaries whom the politician could benefit from when it is time for elections. To them, the basic level can go to hell with empty classrooms and overworked teachers.
Why can’t the government redirect trainee allowances to employ trained teachers and offer student loans to those needing support, so they can repay after their training just like other tertiary students?
I dare say the Government lacks the balls to do that because of the fear of losing votes in the next elections. For this reason, children at the basic level of education are the ones paying the price for these skewed policies.
Is it not yet time to prioritise our education before politics? Anyway, the MP for Shama in the Western region, Emelia Arthur, last week assured her constituents that they are going to build more teacher training colleges.
The writer, Felix Anim-Appau, works with the online unit at Media General. The views expressed in this piece are his personal opinions and do not reflect, in any form or shape, those of the Media General Group, where he works. His email address is [email protected], and he can be found on X as @platofintegrity
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