Former rector of the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA), Prof Stephen Adei, has urged government to replace trained teachers with Senior High School leavers in public schools.

According to the long time Academician, the trained teachers whose competence is questionable are collapsing the educational sector in basic public schools across the country.

Prof. Adei further suggested to the government to sack all these trained teachers in order to replace them with SHS leavers who are doing better with pupils in private schools.

He stated: “That is why I believe that today if you sack all the public teachers in the basic school, there will not be a deterioration in education and if anybody dares it, they should challenge me and I will show that secondary school failures can do a better job than them because they are not teaching”

“After three years, with the lowest qualifications in secondary school, they go to training colleges and when they finish they are paid more than graduate secondary school teachers,” Prof. Adei claimed.

Prof. Adei said he was not surprised at the public school teachers’ conduct claiming “most of them take their children to private schools where the teachers have never gone to any training college; they are secondary school failures and yet they deliver better quality education than our trained teachers”.

For him, the best way to solve the problem would be to sack all the teachers in public basic schools for them to apply again to be considered on merit, for the teaching job but in a more decentralized manner.

He explained that in that case, the headteachers should be mandated to hire and fire teachers they want based on their performance.

“Let me tell you, if today, in the unlikely possibility that all the teachers are sacked in the public schools, and then the government, without a pesewa extra, asked people to apply for head teachership and he gives the headteacher the mandate to recruit the teachers he wants, and fire them if they don’t perform,”

This, he said, could cause a drastic change that would bring performance to the basic education sector, saying “within six months, despite all the listed argument, you will see a total transformation.