Over 50 per cent of private schools teachers are not qualified ― TRCN

The Teachers’ Registration Council of Nigeria (TRCN) has reaffirmed that more than half of all the teachers in private primary and secondary schools across the country are not professionally qualified to teach in schools.

It put the figure of those in the public schools at less than 17 percent of their total nationwide.

The Registrar and Chief Executive of the council, Prof Segun Ajiboye, said this on Tuesday in an exclusive interview with our correspondent, who asked for the update on the first phase of the one-week professionally compliance verification exercise that ended today nationwide.

According to him, so many teachers in private schools are just not qualified to be in classrooms teaching students because they are not certified by TRCN as stipulated by the law and in accordance with the international best practices.

That is why, he pointed out, that TRCN beams it searchlight more on them than in public schools.

“Though some of them are now sitting for the TRCN professional examination, there is a need for everyone who wants to be a teacher to be licensed,” he stressed.

But when asked of thousands of N-Power teachers deployed by the Federal Government in public schools across the country and that many of them did not even study education courses, he said those in that category are truly not teachers in the real sense of the profession.

He said that was why they are expected to undergo a three-month affiliated teaching training programme and that those who want to remain in the profession must have to register as licensed teachers to do so.

Prof Ajiboye, from the University of Ibadan, who also bemoaned the position of some state government in making TRCN certificate only an added advantage and not mandatory for teachers’ recruitment, he said such policy is not only wrong but inimical to the teaching profession and education development.

According to him, the TRCN certificate should be the first requirement for would-be coming to the teaching profession and not an option.

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On the verification exercise, he said the exercise which was carried out at FCT and in all states of the federation except the three troubled northeastern states of Borno, Adamawa, and Yobe, which have serious security challenges, went very well.

He said the various state coordinators of the exercise are expected to collate their reports and send them to the national technical committee for onward transmission to the council.

He said TRCN would not hesitate to sanction non registered teachers.