Ghana Teaching Qualifications and UK QTS: What Changed in September 2026

Ghana's relationship with the English QTS recognition service is, on the published numbers, the most remarkable of any country's. When the DfE opened the service to a wider group of countries on 1 February 2023, Ghanaian teachers did not merely apply in large numbers — they accounted for the clear majority of everything the service received in its first two months, from every country on earth combined. Three years and seven months later, that route is closed.

The exclusion story runs in parallel with Nigeria's, and there is no point pretending otherwise: the same date, the same stated reason, the same statistic. But the situation underneath is genuinely different, and understanding the difference tells you something useful about where you personally stand. Nigeria's problem is structural and ongoing — its entry-level teaching qualification is still, today, a sub-degree certificate. Ghana's is generational: the country reformed its teacher education in 2018, and whether you trained before or after that reform is very likely the single biggest determinant of what routes are open to you now.

What changed on 9 September 2026

The DfE's policy paper A fairer approach to awarding QTS to overseas teachers was updated on 9 September 2026 to record that, from that date, teachers who trained to teach in Ghana, India or Nigeria will not be able to use the Apply for QTS in England service. The supporting guidance document, Overseas-trained teachers: apply for qualified teacher status in England, was republished the same day.

Ghana had been eligible since 1 February 2023. Under the arrangements that applied at launch, teachers from Ghana and several other newly added countries could be recognised only if they taught maths, science or languages to 11 to 16-year-olds. The DfE's August 2025 reform removed that subject restriction, on the reasonable ground that two teachers with identical training were receiving different answers purely because of the subject on their timetable. Thirteen months after that liberalisation, Ghana lost the route altogether.

The countries that can still use the service with no additional conditions are Australia, Canada, the EEA, Guernsey, Hong Kong, Jersey, New Zealand, Switzerland, Ukraine and the USA, with Gibraltar, Northern Ireland and Scotland handled through the same service, and Jamaica, Singapore and South Africa eligible on conditional terms. Ghana is not on any of those lists.

The scale of Ghana's use of the service

The Teaching Regulation Agency publishes a country-by-country breakdown of applications, awards and declines in Annex A of its Annual Report and Accounts 2023-24. Ghana's figures are, by a distance, the largest in the table, and they are worth sitting with for a moment because they reframe how significant this closure is.

Across both tables Ghana submitted 14,929 applications and received 2,322 awards, with 9,448 recorded declines. Ghana and Nigeria together accounted for around 84% of all applications in the opening window and around 66% in the following year. For scale, in the same second table Hong Kong recorded 1,017 applications, Australia 494, South Africa 617 and India 1,763.

The TRA's narrative sections corroborate the pressure this created. The agency recorded a formal risk that a significant increase in the volume of QTS applications from overseas-trained teachers would cause delays to the award of QTS, and reported that its Teacher Qualification Unit helpdesk missed its five-working-day email response target between September and December 2023 specifically because of a high number of enquiries related to the professional recognition of overseas trained teachers.

The DfE's stated reason

The DfE applied a two-limb test: to remain eligible, a country must have a national regulator that can confirm a teacher's professional standing, and must be able to provide references that meet the service's requirements. India was excluded on the first limb, having no national body able to confirm individual professional standing. Ghana and Nigeria were excluded on the second.

The specific finding is that more than 70% of applications from teachers in Ghana and Nigeria included work history references that used public email addresses — Gmail and Hotmail are the examples given — rather than a school's official email domain. That is a statement about verifiability, not a finding of wrongdoing against any individual, and the published guidance does not make the stronger claim. The service's design depends on confirming employment history with an institution, and an address anyone can create in a minute cannot be confirmed with an institution.

It is worth noting, without disputing a decision that is made and has no published appeal route, that a very large part of Ghana's school sector — particularly private and low-fee basic schools — does not operate an institutional email domain at all. A head teacher writing from a Gmail address may be writing from the only address that head teacher has. That does not change the outcome, but it does change what you should do when a future provider or employer asks for references, which we cover below.

Ghana's regulator: the National Teaching Council

Ghana, unlike India, has exactly the kind of national regulator the DfE's first limb requires — which is why the reason given for Ghana was the reference limb rather than the regulator limb.

The National Teaching Council is mandated by the Education Regulatory Bodies Act 2020 (Act 1023) to improve the professional standing and status of teachers and to ensure the licensing and registration of teachers in Ghana. It is the body that registers teachers, administers the licensure examination, and can confirm whether a named teacher holds professional status.

Since 2018, entry to the profession has run through the Ghana Teacher Licensure Examination. Before that reform, completing a college or university of education was itself sufficient to qualify; from 2018, newly trained teachers have had to pass the GTLE, administered by the NTC, to obtain a professional licence. Candidates are eligible to sit it holding a Bachelor of Education degree or a Postgraduate Diploma in Education, and are required to reach a minimum standard in each category of the examination rather than an aggregate.

The NTC has also run regularisation work for teachers already in service without professional status — in July 2024 it announced a collaboration with the Ghana Education Service to regularise the professional status of untrained in-service teachers employed before September 2018. That is a useful signal of something relevant to a UK application: a meaningful number of people teaching in Ghanaian classrooms have been doing so without the full professional registration that an overseas recognition process would need to see.

The 2018 reform and the generational split

This is the genuinely Ghanaian part of the story, and it is the part that explains the decline rate far better than the reference statistic does.

Until recently, the standard route into basic-school teaching in Ghana was the Diploma in Basic Education (DBE) — a three-year post-secondary programme delivered by the Colleges of Education, which were the main providers of teacher education in the country. It was a diploma, not a degree.

In 2018 that changed. Ghana's President announced that all Colleges of Education would be upgraded to University College status and would offer a four-year Bachelor of Education degree with effect from the 2018/19 academic year, as part of a wider drive to raise teaching standards by requiring all teachers to hold a four-year bachelor's degree. Following legislation and with effect from October 2018, the Colleges of Education became four-year degree-awarding institutions rather than three-year diploma-awarding colleges.

The consequence is a clean generational line running through the Ghanaian teaching profession. A teacher who completed initial training from 2018/19 onwards through a College of Education holds a four-year bachelor's degree — which is simultaneously the degree and the teaching qualification, and is the strongest possible position for any overseas recognition or assessment process. A teacher who completed initial training before that reform, through the same institutions, most likely holds a DBE — a diploma below bachelor's level.

Why that split explains the decline rate

Set the timeline against the requirements and the 72% decline rate stops being mysterious.

The recognition service required a bachelor's degree of the same academic standard as a UK undergraduate degree, and a teaching qualification meeting the standard of a level 6 qualification lasting at least as long as English initial teacher training. The TRA stated it plainly in its 2023-24 annual report: all qualified teachers who were awarded QTS had achieved a teacher training qualification of at least academic level 6 or equivalent. The service also required at least one school year of employed teaching experience after qualifying.

Now do the arithmetic. The service opened to Ghana on 1 February 2023. The first cohort to enter Colleges of Education under the new four-year B.Ed started in the 2018/19 academic year and would have graduated around 2022, then needed post-qualification teaching experience on top. So at the moment the service opened, the population of Ghanaian teachers holding a four-year B.Ed and the required experience was, by construction, very small — while the population holding a DBE and years of classroom experience was very large.

If that reading is right, it has a practical implication worth acting on. It means most Ghanaian declines were not about the applicant's competence, their references, or anything they could have presented differently. It means they were about a mismatch between an entry qualification that was entirely correct in Ghana and a degree-level threshold in England. And that in turn means the routes worth pursuing now are the ones that do not test qualification equivalence in the same way — which is precisely what assessment only and iQTS are.

Where you stand, by qualification

• Four-year B.Ed from a College of Education or university (2018/19 onwards). Both a bachelor's degree and a teaching qualification in one award. The strongest position, and the one that opens assessment only directly if you also have the teaching experience.
• A bachelor's degree in any subject plus a PGDE. The degree satisfies the graduate requirement; the Postgraduate Diploma in Education is the teaching qualification. Note that for assessment only there is no statutory requirement that your degree subject matches what you teach.
• A DBE topped up to a full bachelor's degree. Many Ghanaian teachers have done exactly this through university top-up programmes. Once the degree is a single, complete award in its own right, you are in the same position as a direct B.Ed holder.

• Diploma in Basic Education alone. A three-year diploma, not a bachelor's degree. This was the binding constraint for a very large share of applicants and is not fixable by reapplying.
• A DBE combined with another sub-degree certificate. The DfE's assessment only criteria require any qualification equivalent to a UK first degree to be one single qualification, not an aggregation of a number of separate qualifications. You cannot add two sub-degree awards together. The permitted exception is extending an existing qualification to reach the required level — which is what a genuine top-up programme does.
• Teaching without NTC registration. If you were teaching in service without full professional status, that is a real obstacle for any process that asks about professional standing, and worth resolving with the NTC first if you can.

Your routes from here

All three remaining routes to QTS are open to Ghanaian-trained teachers, because none has a country-of-training condition. Our companion page, QTS routes after the Ghana, India and Nigeria closure, works through each in full — entry criteria, current provider fees, sequencing and a decision framework. Here is how the choice maps onto Ghanaian qualifications specifically.

Fixing the reference problem, because it follows you

The recognition service is closed to you, but the verification issue that closed it will resurface with every assessment only provider, iQTS provider and prospective employer, all of whom need to confirm your employment history too. The DfE has effectively told the world what it is worried about, so treat that as free intelligence.

• Contact every referee before you name them and confirm the exact address they will reply from. A referee who has moved on and can only reply from a personal account is a problem to find now, not months in.
• Where a school has an institutional domain, insist on it. If a head teacher holds both a school address and a personal one, only the school one is worth giving.
• Where a school genuinely has no domain, corroborate rather than pretend. Supply letterheaded, signed and stamped confirmation of employment, evidence of the school's registration with the Ghana Education Service or relevant authority, payslips, contracts and the school's published contact details. A personal-domain reference sitting alongside independently verifiable institutional evidence is a far stronger package than a bare personal-domain reference.
• Get your NTC registration and GTLE evidence in order. Professional registration is separate from employment references and is exactly the kind of independently verifiable fact that strengthens a file.
• Build English references as fast as you can. Once you are in an English school — including in supply, cover supervisor or teaching assistant work — you start accumulating references from domains nobody will question. That alone is a strong argument for getting into an English classroom early.

Visas and sponsorship

Nothing on this page affects your right to enter or work in the UK. QTS is a professional qualification awarded by the Teaching Regulation Agency on behalf of the DfE; permission to be here is a Home Office matter, decided under entirely separate rules.

For most Ghanaian teachers that means a Skilled Worker visa sponsored by a school or academy trust holding a Home Office sponsor licence — and the DfE's own guidance acknowledges that only a small number of schools in England sponsor visas. The efficient search is at trust level rather than school level, because a multi-academy trust pays a single licence fee covering every school in it. Our teacher visa sponsorship guide explains how to find licensed sponsors, what the process involves and how long it takes.

Two points that are routinely got wrong elsewhere. School teaching occupations are not tested against the general £41,700 Skilled Worker salary threshold: they sit in a separate category of listed education occupations with a £25,000 floor alongside a going rate drawn from the national teacher pay scale, which a teacher paid properly on the STPCD clears comfortably — see our salary threshold guide. And the sponsor licence fee, the £525 Certificate of Sponsorship fee and the Immigration Skills Charge are legally the school's to pay and cannot be recovered from you, while the visa fee and health surcharge normally are yours — our guide to who pays teacher visa costs covers the clawback rules.

Sources and accuracy

The 9 September 2026 closure and its effective date come from the update history of the DfE policy paper A fairer approach to awarding QTS to overseas teachers and from Overseas-trained teachers: apply for qualified teacher status in England on GOV.UK. The stated reason — that more than 70% of applications from Ghana and Nigeria used public email domains for work-history references — and the two-limb eligibility test come from that guidance.

The application, award and decline figures, the two-or-more-years-experience percentages and the worldwide totals come from Annex A, tables 1 and 2, of the Teaching Regulation Agency Annual Report and Accounts 2023-24, with awards and declines accurate as at 4 June 2024 and not all applications having reached an outcome. The TRA's recorded risk about overseas application volumes and the helpdesk performance note for September to December 2023 come from the same report, as does the statement that all teachers awarded QTS held a teacher training qualification of at least academic level 6 or equivalent.

The National Teaching Council's mandate under the Education Regulatory Bodies Act 2020 (Act 1023), the Ghana Teacher Licensure Examination and its eligibility requirements, and the July 2024 NTC and Ghana Education Service work to regularise untrained in-service teachers come from the NTC's own published material. The 2018 upgrade of the Colleges of Education to University College status, the four-year B.Ed replacing the three-year Diploma in Basic Education from the 2018/19 academic year, and the October 2018 effective date come from Ghanaian government announcements and contemporaneous education-sector reporting of the reform.

The four-year rule, the £1,500 to £4,000 assessment only fee range, the 14 iQTS providers and the £9,250 to £32,000 ITT fee range come from GOV.UK's Routes to qualified teacher status (QTS) for teachers and those with teaching experience outside the UK. The assessment only entry criteria, including the single-qualification rule, the two-school requirement and the three-month expectation, come from the DfE's Assessment only route to QTS: criteria and supporting advice, December 2025. Provider fees are each provider's own published 2026/27 figures.

We have flagged in the text the one substantial piece of analysis that is ours rather than the DfE's: the conclusion that the size of the pre-2018 DBE cohort is the principal driver of Ghana's decline rate. The DfE does not publish decline reasons by country, and we are not going to imply that it does. This page is independent guidance, is not affiliated with the DfE, the Teaching Regulation Agency, the National Teaching Council or any recruitment agency, and is not regulated immigration advice.