NTI Says 80% Of Teachers In North Not Qualified, Kaduna Gov Says It’s 50%

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About 80 percent of school teachers in most northern states in the north are not qualified for the job, National Teachers’ Institute, NTI, has said.

Speaking, 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, Director-General of the Institute, Dr. Aminu 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.”

Also speaking at the occasion, Governor Muhktar Yero of Kaduna State, however, said only 50 percent of the teachers in his state were not qualified and not 80.

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.

“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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