Benin City — The audit of the Edo State Government of primary schools in the state has revealed massive falsification of age of primary school teachers in the state public schools.

In a town hall meeting on state of education, yesterday, Governor Adams Oshiomhole, said its audit carried out by the state's Information and Communications Technology, showed that 789 teachers out of 1,379 obtained their Primary School Leaving Certificates before the age of eight or nine.

He said "some of the records show there were a few who were particularly gifted and finished primary school before they were born. We found that of all our primary school teachers, only 1,287 representing nine percent out of 14,484 teachers had proper and accurate records in our system. Of this, 91 percent had various forms of discrepancies in their records.

"About 1,379 teachers representing 11.5 percent claim that they obtained their primary school certificates after they had been employed as teachers. In fact, some obtained their Primary School Certificates not more than two years ago, from the school in which they were employed as teachers.

"The question then is whether they went to Teachers' Training College or obtained National Certificate of Education, NCE, before they went to primary school. These are facts that have been well documented. It will not be helpful to the cause of education and our resolve to deliver quality education to our pupils if we do not deal with these issues decisively."

The governor who reeled out statistics on the teacher-student ratio in all the local government areas of the state, said that the average of 30 students per teacher in the state was much lower than the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, UNESCO recommendation on student-teacher ratio.