Two million teachers have been certified and registered to teach in Nigeria, Prof. Josiah Ajiboye, Registrar, Teachers Registration Council of Nigeria (TRCN), said on Friday in Abuja.
Ajiboye, who addressed newsmen on activities of the Council in the year 2019, said that the teachers were confirmed as certified professionals in the ongoing registration exercise.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), reports that the council had earlier given an ultimatum of December 31, 2019 as the deadline to ban unqualified persons from teaching in the classroom.
“The examination and registration exercise is not targeted at sacking anyone from his or her job; what we want is just to sanitise the country’s educational system.
“We also want to enhance professionalism while ensuring that every child got quality education; the era of using the teaching job as a political patronage for just everyone is over.
“We now have over two million registered, qualified and certified teachers. We want to ensure that the teaching profession is no longer an all-comers job.
“The qualifying examination is to ensure that we have a data bank to serve as a gatekeeper to weed out those who should not be in the classroom,” he said.
Ajiboye said that the council was also using the exercise to recover the data base of qualified teachers, following the introduction of the Professional Qualifying Examination.
He suggested that the examination should be scheduled to hold every quarter to meet the yearnings of prospective teachers.
Ajiboye said that the step would also increase the number of qualified teachers in schools.
The Registrar said that the council had successfully built a Teachers Career Path policy so as to remove teachers from the normal scheme of service to a special scheme that would improve their welfare and working conditions.
Ajiboye said that there would be a project in 2020 tagged: ”One teacher, one laptop”, to cater for the needs of teachers.
“The project is important to enable teachers keep abreast of current development; a teacher must be able to learn and keep learning,” he said.
