NAB moves to restore quality standards in legal education

The National Accreditation Board (NAB) as part of a decisive move to restore sanity and quality standards in the country’s legal education, is on course to form a joint committee with the General Legal Council, to monitor the operations of the “mushrooming” law faculties in the country.

Mr Kwame Dattey, NAB Executive Secretary, told the Ghana news Agency (GNA) in Accra that the Board’s Standing Committee would in a crunch meeting on Friday, October 16, brainstorm and come out with new modalities to aid reinforcement of sanctions against errant law faculties.

The action is an apparent fall out of recent allegations made by Mrs Georgina Theodora Wood, the Chief Justice, to the effect that 'the proliferation of faculties of law over the past decade had not been accompanied by the promotion and maintenance of standards’.

According to the Chief Justice, different faculties had sprung up with wide and differential standards in teaching, pedagogy and standards.

The Chief Justice made the observation at the State House in Accra recently when 219 newly- trained lawyers were called to the bar.

She is reported to have said that some schools do not have the critical wherewithal to run law programmes since ‘they do not have full time faculties and lacked library facilities.’

Mr. Dattey stated that the said committee would be approved by NAB’s Standing Committee with the mandate to conduct snap, impromptu pre-accreditation checks in these schools.

This would be done at lecture hours to ascertain whether or not law faculties conformed to laid-down standards in terms of teaching methodologies, content and if they had good library facilities.

He said the Joint Committee would then make general recommendations ranging from lapses to quality performance to the Board for the necessary actions and sanctions to be taken.

Mr Dattey called on tertiary institutions running law programmes to be compliant with NAB’s recommendations saying that defiant schools risked being asked to stop admissions or worse, their accreditations being revoked, but added that those with minor shortcomings would be given some time frame for rectification.

The Executive Secretary invited heads of such institutions who have some challenges not to hesitate to report them to the Board.