The Deputy Minister for Education, Dr Clement Apaak, has assured teachers that the concerns which led to a planned strike over the placement of newly promoted teachers on appropriate salary scales will not recur.
He said the government has reached an agreement with teacher unions to ensure that teachers who successfully pass their promotional examinations are automatically placed on their legitimately earned salary scales without having to submit additional payslips or other documentation.
The assurance follows an emergency meeting between the leadership of the teacher unions and the Minister of Education, Haruna Iddrisu, on Monday, August 31, 2026, after the unions threatened industrial action over delays in implementing the promotions.
Speaking on Eyewitness News, Dr Apaak said the government was committed to honouring the agreement and preventing the matter from becoming a recurring source of industrial tension.
“We are on record, and we expect to uphold our side of the bargain as a government of integrity, so the Ghanaian people can be rest assured that we will do the needful, because education is too important to be disrupted,” he said.
Teachers to be placed without additional documents
Under the new arrangement, teachers who have passed their promotional examinations will not be required to provide payslips or other documentation as a condition for placement on the appropriate salary scales.
Dr Apaak said the effective date for the new placement has also been agreed as January 2026, regardless of whether the teacher sat the promotional examination in the previous year or earlier in 2026.
“Whether you wrote last year or you wrote this year, in the interest of peace, camaraderie, and mutual respect, all teachers who wrote their promotional exams and have passed would be put on the scale that they deserve and the salaries based on their new scales,” he said.
According to the Deputy Minister, the arrangement was reached as a compromise following discussions between government and the teacher unions, with both sides making concessions to safeguard industrial peace in the education sector.
77,000 to 80,000 teachers affected
Government has also committed to resolving the placement of between 77,000 and 80,000 teachers by the end of September 2026.
Dr Apaak acknowledged that the large number of teachers involved, together with the transmission of information between the Ghana Education Service (GES) and the Controller and Accountant-General’s Department, could result in administrative delays.
To address this, he said government has agreed on a contingency arrangement to ensure that no teacher is disadvantaged if all eligible teachers cannot be onboarded simultaneously.
“Should there be a situation where we are not able to onboard all the 77,000 to 80,000 at once, we will do a supplementary to clear the backlog, but nobody would be shortchanged,” he said.
Dr Apaak reiterated that government considers education too important to be disrupted by administrative challenges and assured teachers that the agreed measures would be implemented.
