Assessment of Law training institutions begin with University of Ghana

The National Accreditation Board (NAB) and the General Legal Council (GLA) have commenced an assessment of institutions running Law programmes to ascertain the quality of training and the level at which they are operating within the mandate.

The exercise is to find out what the institutions are doing right, what they are doing wrong, and what they have to do differently to improve upon the quality assurance processes to be able to produce quality human resource.

The two bodies asked questions that bordered on minimum entry requirements into law programmes, staff qualifications and staff strength, as well as physical facilities, financial and other resources needed to run law programmes.

At a meeting held on Monday at the Law Faculty of University of Ghana (UG), Legon, Dr Samuel Obeng Manteaw, a lecturer at the faculty, said the University admitted students with West African Senior School Certificate and post graduate certificates, who undertook the course for four and three years respectively.

He said the faculty had stringent admission procedures to ensure that qualified students were admitted and trained.

He, however, said that WASSCE graduates were more focused on their lessons than post-degree holders, with the latter usually absenting themselves from lectures but generally, they all perform well in their studies.

Madam Christine Dowuona-Hammond, a senior lecturer at the faculty, said they had strong lecturing and tutorial sessions all handled by lecturers of the faculty with students being made to deliver presentations at  certain times.

She said the faculty had a mechanism for constantly assessing performance of lecturers through the soliciting of feedbacks from students through questionnaires at the end of every academic year.

She said the faculty also constantly revised its course outline and course materials to ensure that they were up-to-date and met the industry requirements.

Justice Anin Yeboah, a justice of the Supreme Court, said there was the need for a mechanism by all institutions with law faculties to deal with the issue of poor attendance to lectures.

On the law library, Justice Anin Yeboah urged the head of the library to be proactive and get the requisite and up-to-date books and materials for the library and ensure there was enough for the student population.

During the interaction, the lecturer to student ratio of the faculty was assessed at 1:37, by Dr Kingsley Nyarko, the Executive Director of NAB who said standardised lecturer to student ratio should be 1:27.

He said there was the need for more lecturers to be added to the faculty to ensure ample time for intensive tutorials as well as ensuring that lecturers will also have time to contribute to journals and write books on relevant topics in the field of law.

Dr Nyarko said there was the need to develop a programme to train students in Law Librarianship because during the interaction, it came up that there was only one law librarian across the country located at the Law Faculty of UG, Legon.

He said the two bodies would extend the assessment exercise to 10 other law training institutions.

GNA

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NAB pix

CAPTION-The team on inspection at the UG Law School