Sustaining change in the quality of teaching: Successes and challenges in reforming the teacher education system in Ghana

• In Event: Strengthening systems for sustainable change: lessons learned from four large-scale education programs

Proposal

Ghana has been a leader in the delivery of Education for All, reaching the education Millennium Development Goals well ahead of the 2015 deadline. That said, questions surrounding the quality of Ghana’s education remain, as only 16% of grade six students are proficient in mathematics and only 35% are proficient in English (Ghana National Education Assessment, 2011; UNICEF, 2018). The Transforming Teacher Education and Learning (T-TEL) programme is a 6-year, £30M, DFID education program that aims to reform the initial teacher education system in Ghana, in order to facilitate and sustain improvements in teaching and learning. It is a national program that works at scale in all 40 Ghanaian colleges of education (COEs); and its approach to strengthening the teacher education system has not only involved capacity development within these institutions but has also entailed a great deal of political engagement and radical teacher education policy reforms.

More specifically, the past twelve months of teacher education reforms have been arguably the most momentous and fast-paced in the history of Ghanaian education following the approval, on 28th September 2017, of the Cabinet Memorandum on the Policy on Teacher Education Reform. This key document set out four new and unequivocal pillars of teacher education reform in Ghana, namely:

•The approval of the National Teachers’ Standards (NTS);
•The approval of the National Teacher Education Curriculum Framework (NTECF);
•The conversion of Colleges of Education into University Colleges of public Universities offering teacher education and consequential amendment of Education Act 847;
•The design of a new 4-year Bachelor of Education curriculum to be offered at the University Colleges of Education from October 2018.

This Cabinet Memorandum was the culmination of an unprecedented period of consultation and collaboration amongst Ghanaian educationalists, facilitated by T-TEL, which led to the development of both the National Teachers’ Standards and National Teacher Education Curriculum Framework. These two documents provide a clear articulation of the nation’s expectations of the standards required by a teacher and the structure and content of the initial teacher education curriculum required to train teachers to such standards.

This paper will discuss and reflect on the lessons learned through the process of teacher education system and policy reform, the obstacles and resistance to change which had to be overcome, and the impact the program has had so far. It will describe how a flexible and adaptive approach, rooted in the power and legitimacy of cabinet-approved documents, enabled resistance to be overcome. This example of policy endorsement, and the political engagement required to achieve it, will be discussed and participants will be invited to reflect on how and to what degree it is applicable in other contexts. The paper will also explain how these teacher education policies are situated as part of a much broader set of reforms which are designed to improve learning outcomes across the country.

Author

• Akwasi Addae-Boahene, Cambridge Education