The Teachers Registration Council of Nigeria has disclosed that Oyo, Lagos and Kaduna are atop the list of 2.2 million qualified teachers registered so far with the TRCN ahead of the December 31 deadline for all teachers across the country.
While Oyo State emerged tops with 5, 200 registered qualified teachers, Lagos has 5, 117 to come second; and Kaduna 4, 616.
Also, the Federal Capital Territory (Abuja) is the fourth with 4, 214 qualified registered teachers and followed by Plateau State with 3, 709.
The state with the least number of qualified registered teachers is Sokoto State with only 363, followed by Zamfara State with 397 and Cross River State with 570.
Disclosing this in Abuja on Monday 30th September, 2019, TRCN Registrar, Prof. Segun Ajiboye, said that 83 percent of qualified teachers that had so far registered with the council were from public schools.
Ajiboye said that the council would not extend the December 31 deadline to flush out unqualified teachers from Nigerian schools.
The registrar explained that Nigeria needed quality teachers to deliver quality education and not ‘quacks.’
He said that the ultimate goal was to remove quackery from the teaching profession in order to ensure that only those with required competence give the Nigerian children quality education.
As of now, TRCN has registered over two million two hundred teachers that are qualified and registered with us.
“But we know that this figure cannot capture even what we have. We have a larger number- more than four million teachers in our school system- and a large number of these people have not yet registered with TRCN and, therefore, the National Council on Education (NCE) gave that deadline of December 31st, 2019 for all teachers to get qualified, registered and licensed by the TRCN,” he added.
We are close to the deadline now and that is why this year we have done the first Professional Qualifying Examination in May. We are planning to have about two other Professional Qualifying Examinations. The next one is going to be in this month of October and we will have the last one before the deadline, which will come up in November.
The TRCN registrar said that over 60,000 candidates had applied to write the Professional Qualifying Examinations taking place nationwide next weekend.
He therefore urged those that had yet to register with the council to take the opportunity of the qualifying tests to do so before the deadline.
