Over 80% northern teachers not qualified - NTI Over 80 per cent of teachers in the North are not qualified to teach, the Director-General (DG) of the National Teachers Institute (NTI) Kaduna, Dr Aminu Ladan Sharehu, has said. Sharehu said in the southern part of the country, teachers engaged were well qualified and regretted that so many factors were responsible for the number of unqualified teachers in the North. Similarly, Kaduna State governor, Alhaji Muhktar Ramalan Yero, said about 50 per cent of teachers engaged to teach in the state were below the required qualification and had been given a time frame within which to improve. Both Sharehu and Governor Yero spoke in Zaria at a national conference on, ‘Quality assurance and control in teacher education as a tool for achieving the Millennium Development Goals,’ organised by Federal College of Education (FCE), Zaria, on Wednesday. Sharehu, who stressed the importance of re-training those in the teaching profession, said over 80 per cent of teachers in the North were below standards because there was no motivation. According to him, “you need to train and retrain teachers because NCE is just a starting point. In the teaching profession, we don’t have learned people, but learning people, because we believe that there is no end to learning till death. So, it is only lawyers that are proudly calling themselves learned.” Represented by the Commissioner for Education, Mohammed Usman, Governor Yero said, “The Federal Ministry stipulates that the minimum teaching qualification in our schools should be NCE, but the majority of teachers we have today in the system are not NCE holders. So, how can they qualify to teach the new curriculum? There is no way, because that means they are underqualified, and many of our teachers today are underqualified.” “As the commissioner for education of Kaduna State when I came on board, I discovered that 50 percent of the teachers, particularly the primary schools were under qualified. There is no way they can do the job very well. I have to give them a time frame of five years within which to upgrade their qualifications and become NCE holders.” “There are teachers in Kaduna that for the past 20 years have never attended one education programme or the other. What do you think of such teacher? As a teacher you need to attend one programme or the other to enhancing your capacity, scale up your knowledge, if you don’t do that, you are left behind because the world is universally changing. We have to flush out close to 1840 teachers within the system because of fake certificates. “As a measure to improve education in the State, the Governor, Muhktar Ramalan Yero has given an approval to recruit 1800 teachers. This is time around, I will make sure that for anybody to be recruited, he must be qualified. We will not allow every Dick and Harry to become a teacher. This is a noble profession”. Source: Nigerian Tribune
Posted on: Thu, 04 Jul 2013 10:45:35 +0000
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