KADUNA —
National Teachers’ Institute, NTI, has said that about 80 percent of all school
teachers in most states in the north were not qualified for the job.
Director-General
of the Institute, Dr. Aminu Sharehu, said this yesterday in Zaria, Kaduna
State, at a national conference on Quality Assurance and Control in Teacher
Education as a Tool for Achieving Millennium Development Goals, organised by
Federal College of Education, Zaria.
However,
Governor Muhktar Yero of Kaduna State, who also spoke on the occasion, said
that only 50 percent of the teachers in his state were not qualified and not
80.
Sharehu
said: “Over 80 percent of teachers in the North are under-qualified because
there is no motivation.
“You need
to train and retrain teachers because the National Certificate in Education,
NCE, is just a start point. In the teaching profession, we do not have learned
people, but learning people because we believe that there is no end to
learning.
“So it is
only lawyers that are proudly calling themselves learned. As for what are
really responsible for poor qualification of teachers in the north, I will keep
that for another day.
“But
there is need for increase in teachers’ salary and continuous increase in their
remuneration to make them better teachers.”
Governor
Yero, who was represented by the state Commissioner for Education, Mohammed
Usman, said: “The Federal Ministry of Education stipulates that the minimum
teaching qualification in our schools should be NCE.
“But
majority of teachers we have today in the system are not NCE holders. So how
can they qualify to teach the new curriculum?
“As a
measure to improve education in the state, Governor Muhktar Yero has given an
approval to recruit 1,800 teachers.
“This
time around, we will make sure that for anybody to be recruited, he must be
qualified. We will not allow every Dick and Harry to become a teacher. This is
a noble profession.
It’s 50%,
says govt
“When I
came on board as the Commissioner for Education in Kaduna State, I discovered
that 50 percent of the teachers, particularly the primary school teachers are
under qualified. There is no way they can do the job very well.
“I had to
give them a time frame of five years within which to upgrade themselves and
become NCE holders.
“There
are teachers in Kaduna that, for the past 20 years, have never attended any
education programme. What do you think of such teachers?
“As a
teacher you need to attend programmes to enhance your capacity and scale up
your knowledge.
“If you
do not do that, you are left behind because the world is changing. We had to
flush out close to 1,840 teachers within the system because of fake
certificates.”
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