Teachers remain the single most important school-based determinant of educational quality and learning outcomes.
Consequently, in developing education systems such as Ghana’s, the question of teacher adequacy becomes even more critical. Yet, despite the complexity of teacher workforce planning, public and policy discussions in Ghana have increasingly become dominated by a single metric: the Pupil-Teacher Ratio (PTR).
Over the years, PTR has gradually evolved from a broad system-monitoring indicator into the dominant benchmark for analysing teacher adequacy.
National discourse often reduces the multi-dimensional question of teacher demand to one simple arithmetic exercise: dividing total enrolment by total teachers and comparing the outcome to the national PTR target.
The growing prevalence of this practice is partly due to the absence of a robust, multi-dimensional teacher workforce planning framework capable of producing more accurate estimates of staffing needs.
Planning
In the absence of such comprehensive planning systems, PTR has increasingly assumed a disproportionate influence in shaping perceptions of recruitment needs.
The danger herein is that, when interpreted narrowly (which is often the case in policy conversations in Ghana), PTR statistics can easily create misleading conclusions about teacher availability.
For instance, at face value, Ghana’s 2024/25 PTR creates the impression that Ghana has either achieved or exceeded its teacher staffing goals nationally.
Indeed, if PTR alone is accepted as the definitive measure of teacher adequacy, one could conclude that the country may no longer even need more.
However, such a conclusion would not only be simplistic but also analytically flawed.
For the avoidance of doubt, the purpose of this article is not to establish whether Ghana currently has adequate or inadequate teacher capacity and what supply and recruitment patterns should be.
Rather, the central argument is to highlight the inherent weaknesses in the continuous grounding of teacher availability discourse on PTR – a pattern I have observed over the years – and to call for a multi-dimensional teacher workforce planning system that is capable of capturing the realities of Ghana’s teacher demand.
Limitations
To start with, one of the most significant limitations of PTR is its failure to account for teacher attrition and replacement demand.
Every year, teachers leave the profession. UNESCO’s International Task Force on Teachers' recent report emphasised that a substantial share of global teacher recruitment needs is driven not by enrolment expansion but by replacement demand arising from teacher exits.
Yet PTR calculations are insensitive to these workforce dynamics.
More concerning is the fact that Ghana currently lacks a sufficiently institutionalised system for tracking teacher attrition rates and integrating such data into national workforce planning.
Consequently, teacher attrition and replacement demand remain largely invisible within policy discussions and have no expression within national education planning indicators.
This represents a major weakness in teacher workforce planning because no education system can sustainably estimate its teacher needs without adequately accounting for the rate at which teachers are continuously exiting the profession.
Presence
Equally problematic is the fact that PTR conflates teacher presence with teacher availability for instruction.
In Ghana, headteachers, assistant headteachers at secondary school level, teachers on secondment, and teachers on study leave are included within the total teaching force used for PTR calculations.
A conservative estimate puts their number at about 30,000. Many of these individuals do not carry full classroom instructional responsibilities; consequently, the indicator risks overstating the actual teaching capacity available within schools.
Also, PTR is pedagogically indifferent as it implicitly assumes that all teachers are interchangeable.
This assumption becomes particularly problematic at the JHS and secondary levels, where subject specialisation is essential.
This limitation is especially concerning within the context of Ghana’s current educational reforms.
The expansion of STEM education, technical education pathways, and digital learning requires not merely additional teachers, but teachers with highly specialised disciplinary competencies.
The absence of subject-specific staffing indicators within national monitoring frameworks is therefore equally worrying and should be a major policy concern.
Without tracking subject-level teacher gaps, vacancy rates, and specialisation adequacy, the education system risks creating the misleading impression of staffing sufficiency, while critical shortages persist.
Size
Besides, PTR does not accurately reflect the actual classroom size.
This limitation becomes evident when policymakers attempt to explain away concerns about overcrowded classrooms by citing the relatively low national PTR figures (confirming this is a Google search away).
Such arguments often stem from the mistaken assumption that PTR and class size measure the same reality. Methodologically, however, they are fundamentally different indicators and should not be used interchangeably.
A country may record a relatively low national PTR while simultaneously experiencing severe classroom overcrowding due to several factors.
Data
Meanwhile, PTR should always be interpreted within the context of class size data. Hence, deliberate efforts must be made to capture, report and monitor class size indicators within national education statistics.
Also, PTR does not exclude the number of unqualified teachers.
Approximately, Ghana has about 42,000 unqualified teachers across its pre-tertiary education level. Relying solely on PTR, therefore, risks reducing teacher adequacy to a question of numerical sufficiency, while overlooking the equally important issue of whether the teaching workforce possesses the requisite qualifications.
Projections
These include workload-based staffing models, subject-specific teacher projections, school-level staffing norms, geographic equity frameworks, attrition-adjusted forecasting models, and cohort-flow simulations that incorporate demographic trends, retirement patterns, policy expansion targets, and curriculum requirements.
Ghana’s education sector would benefit considerably from adopting workforce planning approaches similarly.
Such an evidence-driven teacher workforce planning framework could significantly improve teacher supply planning and resource efficiency within the context of Ghana’s growing fiscal constraints by allowing the government to better forecast future teacher demand, estimate replacement needs, identify priority shortage areas, and align teacher education admissions and specialisation pathways with realistic labour market absorption capacity.
Importantly, it would reduce the recurring policy tensions associated with investing in training teachers whom the education system subsequently struggles to absorb into employment.
This does not imply that PTR lacks utility. As a broad descriptive indicator, it retains value for system monitoring, but it should only function as one component within a more comprehensive and multidimensional teacher workforce planning framework.
The writer is an Education Research & Policy Analyst
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