Beyond Continuity: Options for reforming teacher trainee allowance policy in Ghana

Abstract

Popular resistance to policy change often frustrates reform-minded policymakers and politicians, and this has been the story of the teacher trainee allowance policy in Ghana for more than two decades. Due to its cash-benefit-distributing nature and design, the policy has developed a coalition of beneficiaries and sympathizers with vested interest over the years whose opposition to change has rendered it path-dependent. But is it the case that trainee allowances cannot experience path-departing change? This paper offers insight from institutional analysis of policy change with a special focus on incremental and evolutionary change and argues that a strategic combination of mechanisms of change could alter the existing path of policy in a manner that ensures adequate funding for students while enabling policymakers to achieve the objectives of allowing Colleges of Education in Ghana to operate at optimal capacity in their quest to address the issues of deficits in the supply of professional teachers. In particular, it shows that layering student loans as an alternative option that coexists with  trainee allowances in a manner that links the former to automatic placement in the job market while denying the latter such an opportunity would be instrumental in placing the policy in path-departing change.