By Amos Tauna
Kaduna (Nigeria) — Teachers Registration Council of Nigeria (TRCN), has expressed readiness to partner state governments on teachers training and retraining to ensure that only qualified and competent teachers teach in Nigerian schools.
The Registrar and Chief executive of the council, Josiah Ajiboye, while interacting with newsmen in Kaduna, northwest Nigeria after meeting with relevant education stakeholders from the North West said, the Council do not support the disengagement of unqualified teachers, adding that what the council wants with states are opportunities for unqualified teachers to be trained and retrained.
“We want to seek understanding with state governments to make sure that unqualified teachers undergo training to become qualified and qualified teachers are retrained to ensure professionalism.
“Such alliance with state governments would enable us ensure that only qualified and competent teachers teach in the country. This is because no nation can rise above the quality of its teachers.
“Kano state for example, has trained about 8,000 unqualified teachers in the state as at middle of 2017, and planned to train 19,000 others in the beginning of 2018,” he explained.
He explained that the meeting with chairmen of states Universal Basic Education Board and other relevant stakeholders was organised to discuss the mandate, activities and achievement of TRCN.
He said that the meeting also provided an avenue for the stakeholders to suggest ways of addressing challenges affecting the teaching profession in the country.
“Our goal is to take the teaching profession to the highest level with a view to making the desired impact on education and development of the country,” he added.
On regulating the teaching profession, the registrar described TRCN as the only body in the country empowered to register, monitor and regulate the teaching profession in Nigeria to ensure professionalism.
He said that the council has so far registered and certified 1.8 million professional teachers in the country.
TRCN Coordinator in Kaduna State, Malam Kabir Yar’adua, said that the council has a good working relationship with the state government and Nigerian Union of Teachers with regard to teacher professionalism.
He commended the state government for making TRCN certificate a requirement in its planned recruitment of 25,000 primary school teachers.
Malam Idris Aliyu, Deputy Director School, Kaduna State Ministry of Education, Science and Technology said that there are no plans to sack any unqualified teacher in Kaduna state.
Aliyu said that the state government was only trying to bring sanity and professionalism into the teaching profession by removing those that has no business being in the classroom.
He said that what the state government intends to do was to redeploy unqualified teachers to other agencies and establishments where they fit in and replace them with more qualified teachers.
The Kaduna State Wing of the Nigerian Union of Teachers (NUT) had in a press briefing on Monday announced its decision to embark on indefinite strike to protest the sack of 21,780 teachers.
The state’s Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB) has recently released a list of 11,220 out of 33,000 primary school teachers, who successfully passed the competency test organised by the state government.
The board’s chairman, Nasiru Umar said that 21,780 failed to score the 75 per cent pass mark set by the state government, adding that three months notice would be given to those who failed the test for disengagement.
