The principal of the St. John Bosco’s College of Education, Joseph Amikuzuno has appealed to the government to do away with the policy of paying allowances to teacher trainees in colleges of education across the country.

Amikuzuno explained that the allowances force the colleges to admit below their capacities, thereby leaving facilities in the colleges underutilised and limiting the number of teachers trained even as the teacher-pupil ratio worsens.

Using his college as an example, he lamented how the college had to admit far less than it can comfortably handle due to the quota imposed on them by the government as a result of the re-introduced trainee allowances.

“Last year, we had over 3,000 applicants seeking admission into St. John Bosco’s College of Education. But we could only admit 300 and even that 300, we went over a quota that the government had given us. The government asked us to admit only 270. But somehow, we admitted more".

In other words, if 11 applicants wanted to come to St. John Bosco College of Education. We could only pick 1 out of that 11. That’s how terrible it is,” he lamented at the 16th matriculation ceremony of the school.

He stressed that the notion that the allowances are an incentive to attract people into the teaching profession is no longer tenable given that people would still choose to be teachers without the allowances as evidenced when the allowances were replaced with student loans under president John Mahama.

“Without the allowance, we will still have students trooping into the colleges because they know that when they complete the colleges of education, they have jobs as teachers to begin with. So from my point of view, the allowance should be off. The trainees should be given loans,” he appealed.

Teacher trainee allowances were replaced with student loans during the Presidency of John Mahama, but Nana Akufo-Addo promptly restored the allowances in 2017. With the reintroduction of the allowances, colleges of education have had to reduce drastically the number of students they admitted when the allowances were scrapped.