Acting Director-General of the Ghana Education Service, Charles Yaw Aheto-Tsegah, has intimated the service is “literally” under attack from teachers over its inability to offer placement to trained professionals in schools across the country.

Aheto Tsegah who was on Morning Starr on Starr 103.5 FM addressed the recent plan by the GES to phase out all untrained pupil teachers to make way for those who have been certified by the colleges of education.

The GES received a lot of backlash since it started terminating the appointments of some of these teachers in August with the rest of them being asked to proceed on leave.

Aheto-Tsegah in an interview with host of Morning Starr, Kafui Dey, said their current position was necessitated by the fact that more professional teachers had come into the service making it difficult and expensive to retain the pupil teachers.

“The GES is managed by people who are supposed to know their subjects and be professional about the way they handle children. The pupil teachers are not professionals. We only recruited them when there was a shortage of teachers in the education sector,” he said.

“Increasingly we are getting a lot more of professional teachers coming in. The GES is under severe attack from the University of Education and from authorised private colleges of education. We are under attack because we are accused on a daily basis on why we cannot give employment to graduates of colleges of education.”

Aheto-Tsegah said in order to respect the value chain they will make sure to phase out the pupil-teacher arrangement through a system that will enable them have only professional teachers on the ground eventually.