Unregistered teachers in the country have been issued with sack threat as any teacher who fails to obtain the professional teaching certificate from the Teachers Registration Council of Nigeria (TRCN) would not be allowed to teach beyond 2017. TRCN’s Registrar/Chief Executive Officer Prof. Olusegun Ajiboye said this last week in Ibadan. He said the policy is part of the three-year Ministerial Strategic Plan designed by Minister of Education Malam Adamu Adamu.
At the end of this year, Ajiboye said, TRCN will stop the existing system of registration of teachers which does not involve any examination. The newly introduced professional examination to be conducted by the TRCN shall take place for the first time at the end of September 2017. Ajiboye listed the modules in the examination as Category A (PhD holders); Category B (Masters Degree holders); Category C (Bachelor’s degree holders) and Category D (NCE holders). We support the introduction of this qualifying examination because that’s the only practical way through which holders of teaching qualifications could defend their claims of being trained and qualified teachers.
The TRCN Registrar however said teachers who registered on or before May 31, 2017 would be exempted from the professional qualifying examination. He said the policy is designed to fully professionalize teaching in Nigeria and to ensure that only those qualified to teach are employed by government. This is to guarantee quality assurance in the teaching process. Prof. Ajiboye got it right when he remarked that ‘those who do not have what it takes to be a teacher cannot be trusted with the future of our children’. He said TRCN is out to ensure a guaranteed future for our future leaders by guaranteeing that those who teach them are the best of hands. Laudable as this policy is, its successful implementation, hinges on the extent to which government is prepared to tackle critical challenges that have for several years inhibited the actualization of teaching as a profession in Nigeria.
The existing National Policy on Education stipulates that ‘the minimum qualification for entry into the teaching profession shall be the Nigeria Certificate in Education (NCE).’ Several deadlines set under different administrations for the implementation of this policy failed due to some obvious challenges. For instance, the absence of mechanisms to motivate qualified teachers to remain in the job is a threat to this policy. Many of those who possess teaching qualifications use teaching as a stepping stone to other jobs where they would earn better pay.
Migration of teachers to other jobs would hardly allow for adequate number of qualified teachers to remain in teaching. This also explains the existence of a large number of unqualified teachers especially in public schools. The proposed sack of unregistered (or unqualified) teachers by government can only be effective when and where there are enough qualified teachers to go round existing schools. In practice, teachers generally have the poorest conditions of service. In recent years, teachers in some states of the federation were on strike for as long as 6 months. Even the 27.57% of basic salary approved for the implementation of the Teachers Salary Scale (TSS) for teachers with teaching qualification has not been implemented by many state governments.
In Finland where teaching is a profession, the best brains are classroom teachers because of the incentives provided. In Malaysia, school principals and teachers earn more than medical doctors. To change the situation in order to facilitate the professionalization of teaching in Nigeria, government must consider teachers’ welfare as central to sustaining qualified teachers in their jobs. It would be recalled that TRCN was established in 1993 to among other statutory functions regulate and control the teaching profession. It is also to maintain a register of qualified teachers. TRCN is also empowered to prosecute unqualified teachers found to be illegally performing the job of teachers as such contravenes section 17(2) of the TRCN Act. The question here for TRCN is: what would be the fate, after the 2017 deadline, of the 5,000 N-Power graduates without teaching qualification who have just been engaged by the Federal Government to teach?
