Ex-minister asks teachers to acquire more skills

Forum 11 months ago

Ex-minister asks teachers to acquire more skills

A former minister of Education, Prof Tunde Adeniran, has emphasised the need for teachers to be motivated and encouraged to acquire relevant teaching skills.

Adeniran said it was necessary for the government to ensure that only qualified teachers were recruited to teach in schools, adding the era of employing untrained teachers into the education system due to the increasing level of unemployment should be over.

Recall that the Teachers Registration Council of Nigeria recently lamented the lack of adequate professional teachers in schools, adding that this had affected the quality of teaching in the nation’s education sector.

TCRN’s Registrar, Josiah Ajiboye, had said, “Universally, teachers are key players in the education sector of any nation. However, the challenge with the Nigeria education is largely attributed to poor teaching, where experienced professional teachers who are highly committed, dedicated and virile are difficult to find in our schools.”

Ajiboye stated that the council discovered that a large number of teachers in Nigeria lacked the prerequisite qualification to be registered by the council.

But Adeniran, who spoke in a telephone interview with Saturday PUNCH on Thursday, expressed the need for government to revisit the plan to allow only registered, trained and professional teachers to teach in schools.

For this to be implemented, the former education minister said, “It has to be incentivised. There is a need to encourage those who are going into that profession because it is a profession of all professions.

“They are the ones who train, teach, and educate our lawyers, doctors, engineers and all categories of educators and professionals. They need to be equipped.

“If we are serious and institute strict measures which will include ensuring that those people who are to teach are not only made to have professional certificates but are encouraged to acquire them by giving them incentives and support.

“You do not expect people who have to struggle to maybe feed themselves to go and acquire some knowledge so that they can be able to impart knowledge to others. They will think of self-survival first.”

Adeniran emphasised the need for re-orientation, in-service training and refresher courses to ensure practising teachers were brought up-to-date with the new dynamics of education.

Meanwhile, a human rights lawyer, Mr Tolu Babaleye, has asked the incoming government to prioritise prison reforms with a view to decongesting the correctional facilities.

He also said the government should establish a special court and a task force that would visit the facilities regularly to review cases and strike out issues that were not duly prosecuted.

Speaking in an interview with Saturday PUNCH, Babaleye said most of the inmates who were awaiting trial were increasing the problem of prison congestion, maintaining that a right approach to improving the judicial system would resolve the problem.

“Majority of people that are in prison are awaiting trial and most of them, at the end of the trial, if it is handled diligently, they will be released but unfortunately the system does not allow them to be free before trial.

“The next government should carry out robust prison reforms. Reforms should not only be to change the name from prison to correctional centres; it’s beyond that, but you should live up to the name.”

Speaking further, Babaleye expressed concerns over the health condition of some of the inmates, saying, they don’t correspond to the fund budgeted for them by the Federal Government.

Recall that the Federal Government recently said the sum of N22.44bn was earmarked to feed inmates in all the custodial centres across the country.