THE recent claim by the Universal Basic Education Commission that 80 per cent of teachers employed in Sokoto State public schools lacked teaching qualifications provides a further insight into the profound nature of the crisis currently confronting our educational system. This pathetic situation is also a wake-up call for stakeholders to rise to the challenge of pulling the country’s education sector back from the brink. Neglected by successive governments over the years, this vital sector of our national life is now overwhelmed by a myriad of problems, including poor funding, which has given rise to decrepit and inadequate infrastructure and low enrolment of school-age children. Declining standards have also resulted in mass failure in public examinations – such as those organised by the West African Examinations Council and the National Examinations Council – and lack of confidence in certificates issued by the two examination bodies. The presence of a large number of unqualified teachers taking up teaching jobs in schools is just one of such problems. It has become a festering sore. But of all the challenges confronting the education sector, decline in standards is the one that can be most easily linked with the phenomenon of unqualified teachers. Nothing impacts more directly on the quality of education than the quality of teaching. The Minister of State for Education, Ezenwo Wike, captured it very aptly last year, when he was quoted as saying, “If the teacher quality remains low, there is no way that we can expect better results in our external examinations like WAEC and NECO.” The issue of unqualified teachers is therefore one that should engage the interest of stakeholders more urgently. The National Policy on Education demands that the minimum acceptable qualification for teaching should be the National Certificate of Education, up from the previous minimum of Teachers Certificate (Grade Two). University graduates in disciplines other than education intending to make a career out of teaching are required to obtain a post-graduate diploma in education. In coming up with that policy, the decision makers also fixed 2006 as the deadline for unqualified teachers to update their qualifications or be flushed out of the system. But, six years after that deadline, the reality is that the country is still far from meeting the target. A 2010 evaluation document presented to the National Economic Council by the Minister of Education, Ruqayyatu Rufai, brought the situation into a sharper focus when she admitted that there were a total of 207, 813 unqualified teachers spread across the 36 states of the federation. She went on to explain that the North-West geopolitical zone had 46.8 per cent of the unqualified teachers, while the North-East had 57.7 per cent; North-Central 38 per cent; South-East 16.7 per cent; South-South 19.2 per cent; and South-West 6.7 per cent. The Executive Secretary of UBEC, Ahmed Madibbo, may have limited his assessment to Sokoto, but the Minister’s submission has painted a picture of a crisis on a national scale. This, perhaps, provides the vital clue to why performance in public examinations has been consistently poor in the past few years. Worried by the abiding trend of mass failure in NECO examinations, the House of Representatives, last year, ordered its Committee on Education to conduct a public hearing on the matter after only 25 per cent of candidates who sat for the examinations obtained credit passes in English and Mathematics. In 2010, only 21 per cent of candidates did well in the two subjects, the outcome of which was an improvement on the previous year’s performance of just 10.53 per cent pass rate. Not surprisingly, the Registrar and Chief Executive Officer of NECO, Promise Okpara, also fingered the quality of teaching for the mass failure. But what is the solution to one of Nigeria’s most pressing conundrums? Till now, efforts to tackle this problem have, at best, been desultory. In some cases, it has even been politicised. Some Northern states have planned to hire Master’s degree holders from abroad to teach in their science and technical schools, not minding that there are many unemployed graduates in the country. The Teachers Registration Council of Nigeria, a body set up to regulate and control the teaching profession, has also come up with the idea of registering teachers and prosecuting the unqualified ones. These merely scratch the surface of a deep-rooted problem. What the various state governments need to do is to take the training of teachers more seriously. Teachers with no professional qualifications should be encouraged and assisted to regularise their qualifications. Students majoring in Education in tertiary institutions should also be placed on special allowances to encourage more Nigerians to take to teaching. That teaching needs to be transformed into an attractive profession should go without saying.
Posted on: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 10:23:14 +0000
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