President John Mahama has explained that contrary to assertions that allowances for teacher trainees in Colleges of Education across the country have been cancelled, they have actually only been “swapped”.
President Mahama gave the explanation on Thursday April 28 on Radio BAR in the Brong Ahafo Region, the fourth stop of his Accounting to the People tour which will take him across the entire country.
The government in 2013 decided to stop the payment of grants to students of colleges of education, a decision that has been met with their disapproval.
But the president has explained that the move was a barter for increased enrollment in colleges of education and upgrade of the status of such institutions. He said once the elevation of such institutions to degree-awarding status had been done, it was only fair for students to be moved unto student loan schemes enjoyed by teacher trainees in the traditional universities like the University of Education Winneba and the University of Cape Coast.
The scrapping of the previous restricted system of admission into the colleges, Mr Mahama said, had led to more than 60 per cent students getting the opportunity to be trained as teachers.
“And so, once we decided that we were making them tertiary institutions and bringing them at par with their colleagues in the other universities, then you needed fairness across board. But the most important thing is, 60 per cent of them would not be in the colleges of education if we were still paying teacher training allowances because there was a quota system,” he stressed.
“The benefit in swapping teacher training allowances with student loans is that it allows us to abolish the quota system and make more people come into the colleges of education to get training as teachers and get jobs. And so, 60% of those who are currently in colleges of education would not be there if we were paying training allowances. …That’s the simple truth about it.
“And the point is, if you take the numbers we have in the teacher trainee colleges today because we have increased the numbers by 63 per cent actually, there are 63 per cent more people training to be teachers than we were doing during the teacher training allowances.
“If you take the increased numbers and you calculate how much we will need annually to pay teacher trainees it will amount to GHS223million. That is the crunch.
“…We are saying that we have not scrapped teacher training allowances. What we have done is like it happens in the established tertiary institutions: we have swapped teacher training allowances with student loans every student in tertiary education is entitled to have.
“We’ve cancelled uniforms, they used to go out with exeats, like they were still in the secondary schools; we’ve cancelled that. These are educational universities. …You can’t have your cake and eat it.”
Mr Mahama concluded by stating that prerequisites for obtaining such loans had been relaxed to enable many students of educational universities to easily access such facilities. He mentioned the current requirement for only a single guarantor, down from the previous two.
Source:myjoyonline.com