The Teachers Registration Council of Nigeria, TRCN, yesterday, signed a Memorandum of Understanding, MoU, with a South African-based educational organisation, Instill Education, to upskill in-service teachers in Nigeria.

Registrar of TRCN, Prof. Josiah Ajiboye, who signed the document in Abuja in company of his management team, said a pilot phase of implementation of the MoU would soon commence with a capacity building for eight weeks.

Ajiboye said the MoU has three major components- pre-service teachers, integrating pre-service with in-service teachers and their capacity building programmes, while expressing confidence that the involvement of Instill Education would bridge the gap between pre-service and in-service teachers.

"With regards to our teachers, if you look at what we have said here today, three major components actually were identified: the pre-service teachers, even integrating pre-service with the in-service. We have looked at pre-service teachers, the in-service teachers and their training programmes and we have been able to see that there is a gap."

He lamented that a large number of teachers employed in private schools in Nigeria today were not qualified, in the first instance, to be called teachers, adding that a survey carried out by the council showed that over 90 per cent of the teachers in private schools in the South West were not qualified and not registerable with the TRCN.

"So, these people are not registerable with TRCN because they don't possess the requisite qualification that will allow us to register them. There's a big gap there. Instill Education maybe looking in the future on how to fill that gap. Like they are doing in South Africa, but the major component of this MOU is about the in-service teachers. How do we go about capacitating these in-service teachers, upskilling them?

"And that's what Instill Education is coming with. They are coming up with their expertise and technology to help us to do this kind of capacitation for our teachers. We've been talking over time, about mandatory continuing professional development for teachers, where teachers are going to take certain capacity development programmes and they will get points and this will count towards the renewal of their licence as well as their promotion," he added.