The Impact of Pre-Service Qualification of Teacher Trainees on Quality Education:A Case Study of the Untrained Teachers Diploma in Education (UTDBE) Program

Education has been identified to be the main drive for development and it is an undeniable fact that the role of teachers in providing excellent education to a people is crucial.

Ghana like other nations around the world has signed to global treaties on development targets including the provision of education for all. For some time now, the government of Ghana; both past and present have made tremendous efforts to improving access to schooling and gender equity as per the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and now working even harder on sustaining such goals. However, the issue of quality has remained the biggest challenge, in that, reports still point to unsatisfactory performance in our basic schools, with particular reference to reading and writing. Many pupils and students, as the case may be, still struggle to read with grade-level understanding, while others fail to make it to higher levels of education from completing basic education. All of these have mostly been attributed to students acquiring poor grades from the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) being organized by the West African Examination Council (WAEC).One issue education planners and implementers have almost always failed to evaluate intensely is the quality of teachers being recruited into the Education Service. It’s been said that good teachers produce good learners. Darling Hammond, (1997) intimates that the highest quality teachers are those most capable of helping their students learn and have deep mastery of both their subject matter and pedagogy. This paper analyses data collected by the National Inspectorate Board (NIB) of the Education ministry of Ghana in 2013 to determine the eligibility of participants recruited on the Untrained Teachers Basic Education (UTDBE) program, a program adopted by the Ghana government and supported by USAID to produce teachers to support deprived areas, where participants themselves originated from. Though the survey showed quite a positive picture, it also indicated quite worrying figures of ineligibility of participants, particularly on the academic dimension of the stated requirements; a reason for this discussion which seeks to identify some implications and the way forward.