NCTE, NAB to be merged to end overlapping roles

The Ministry of Education has announced that it will merge the National Council for Tertiary Education (NCTE) and the National Accreditation Board (NAB).

This the ministry said, has become necessary due to the overlapping functions of the two regulatory bodies in the educational sector.

The new institution when inaugurated will have one Director General and three deputies.

Sector Minister in charge of Tertiary, Prof. Kwesi Yankah made this known in a Citi News interview on the sidelines of the investiture and induction into office of Prof. William Kofi Koomson as the new Principal of the SDA College of Education at Asokore – Koforidua in the Eastern Region.

According to Prof. Yankah, the merger will reduce administrative cost and the duplication of roles.

“We are merging two important regulatory bodies. That is the National Accreditation Board and the National Council for Tertiary Education. Through the laws that set them up, we realised that they have overlapping functions. So what we have decided to do is to merge the NCTE and NAB into one body. We will have one Director General and then three Deputies working together. We are doing this to reduce administrative cost and repetitiveness of functions. Some of the acts cannot easily tell which decisions of the two bodies as higher or lower priorities,” he said.

The new tertiary education policy reforms will make private tertiary institutions autonomous without affiliation to any public tertiary institution.

Per the current regulations, private universities will need to be affiliated to public universities for not less than 10 years, before gaining autonomy.

But the Minister of Education in charge of Tertiary Education, Prof Kwasi Yankah says this requirement will no longer be needed when the National Accreditation Board and the National Council for Tertiary Education are merged.

“With the affiliation systems for the private universities, some of them have not had their independence after 15 and even 18 years. We have realised that there are other ways we can do it. We are putting measures in place. It is not as if the private insitions are inferior and the public ones are superior. Whatever regulation that is agreed can now be applied to both. So when the necessary legislation is approved by parliament, it will imply that we are no longer going to have university colleges. They will start in their own name and the they are going to offer their own degrees and not by the public universities,” Prof. Yankah added.

Source: citinewsroom.com