NAB, General Legal Council partner to improve quality of legal education

The National Accreditation Board (NAB) and the General Legal Council (GLC) have held discussions to fine-tune plans on how best to collaborate to improve the quality of legal education in Ghana.

The meeting was held as part of the collaborative drive of the two institutions to address current challenges facing legal education.

The General Legal Council, which is the statutory body mandated to regulate professional legal education in Ghana, was led to the meeting by a Supreme Court Justice, Justice Jones Dotse.

In his remarks, Justice Dotse made reference to the massive failure of students aspiring to be lawyers over time. Hence, the need for both institutions to collaborate to improve standards in legal education. Further, both parties agreed on the need for strict quality control measures in order to improve the teaching and learning of law programmes at the tertiary level.

For his part, the Ag. Executive Secretary of the National Accreditation Board, Dr. Kingsley Nyarko, delivered a presentation on the mandate and workings of NAB.

He enumerated the various processes that institutions seeking accreditation go through and the various quality assurance measures the Board puts in place to assure quality.

Dr. Nyarko posited that post-accreditation exercises such as academic audit, monitoring and investigative visits are but a few of the measures the Board undertakes to ensure that institutions conform to the conditions on which accreditation was granted.

The Chairman of the National Accreditation Board, Professor Kofi Awusabo-Asare re-emphasized how imperative it was for both institutions to carry out joint monitoring activities to the fifteen (15) tertiary educational institutions offering law programmes to ensure minimum standards are maintained.

The General Legal Council and the National Accreditation Board at the meeting decided to carry out review and assessment visits to all institutions running law programmes.

Among the issues discussed were, 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. These among other areas will be the focus for the monitoring exercise to check for compliance to the approved standards.

Some members of the GLC that were in attendance are Professor Ofori Amankwah, Justice Sir Dennis Adjei, K. Prempeh-ECK, Franklina Adanu, Anthony Forson Jnr, Amoako Adjei, Peter Kornor, Justine Amenuvor.

Source: Lawrence Kwarteng-Ashia