Emmanuel Edukugho
4 September 2008
Since its establishment, the Teachers Registration Council of Nigeria (TRCN) has registered over 700,000 teachers nationwide.
The Director of Professional Operation, TRCN, Dr. Steve Nwokeocha, disclosed this recently, when Teachers Registration he led a delegation of the council to Ogun State.
Professional certification of teachers became inevitable to check influx of individuals and all kinds of persons into teaching.
Technically, the majority of Nigerian teachers are not professionals which adversely affected their social status, quality of service, raising the issue of distinction between qualified and unqualified ones.
There has been a long-standing crisis on the quality of teaching going on in primary and secondary schools that many believed to be of poor standard, due to intruders recruited into the profession.
The prevalence of poor teaching even in situations in which teachers are considered "qualified," the type of education provided to the teacher, the training, determined the low social status accorded to the teaching profession.
So, the establishment of TRCN with mandate for certification of teachers in accordance with laid down guidelines, criteria, meeting professional standards, has changed the face of teaching profession in the country.
Leading a TRCN team to Ogun State, Dr. Steve Nwokeocha, said the purpose of the visit was to "brief stakeholders on policies and activities of the council and also to receive advice and guidance on the way forward."
He added: "The council since its establishment has registered over 700,000 teachers nationwide. TRCN is now in the area of training and retraining of teachers in order to improve the quality and efficiency of teachers nationwide."
The Director of Professional Operation appealed to the state government for support in the areas of facilities and operational vehicle to enable TRCN perform its job effectively.
Responding, Ogun State Commissioner for Education, Science and Technology, Prof. Segun Awonusi, assured TRCN of government assistance to enable it perform its assigned role of improving the status of teachers in the country. He noted the importance of the body, saying, "it is saddled with the registration of teachers nationwide and has recorded laudable achievements since its inception."
Referring to the recent teachers strike in which public primary and secondary schools were closed for several weeks, Prof. Awonusi said that the action brought to the fore the question of who is a professional teacher, which to some extent helped to justify the demand of teachers for TSS.
As a regulatory agency, TRCN has national minimum standards for the registration of teachers. It also sensitises professionally unqualified teachers about the need to acquire professional skills.
Concerned about teachers professional development, TRCN has adopted the strategy of Mandatory Continuous Professional Development (MCPS) online. The objective is to make teachers acquire ICT skills preparing them to maximise the opportunities of professional development programmes on the web.
Registration has helped to bring some recognition, respect, order, improved salary and enhanced social status to the teaching profession, which hitherto, had been for all comers and people who regard it as stepping stone to other employments.
Even with TRCN's figure of 700,000 registered teachers, in quantitative terms, the Nigerian school system is still not endowed with sufficient number of teachers.
The nationwide average teacher/pupil ratio is 1:40 at the primary level and 1:30 at the secondary level. (Education Data Bank, 2002) latest available statistics on Teacher-Pupil Ratios (TPR). But there are still wide discrepancies among the states of the federation. For example, primary school TPR ranges from a low 1:19 in Enugu to a high 1:111 in Yobe. At the secondary level, TPR ranges from 1:21 in Ekiti to 1:57 in Gombe.
In Africa, Nigeria occupies a kind of median position, in terms of combined primary-secondary TPR. This places the country in the same range (1:35 to 1:44) as Togo, South Africa, Cote d'Ivoire, Zimbabwe, Liberia, Angola, Niger, Gambia, Eritrea, Mauritania, Equatorial Guinea, Comoros and G.Bissau.
There are shortfalls in the supply of primary and secondary school teachers in virtually every subject taught in the school system. Even subjects like religious studies, commerce, etc. suffer severe shortage of teachers.
The same can be said for Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba, the mother tongue languages.
Mathematics and technical/vocational subjects top the list of teacher-deprived subjects.
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