The Director General of the National Teachers Institute (NTI), Professor Garba Maitafsir, has said that as a lecturer at the University, he came across a PhD Student who could not write his name properly.
He said that the falling
standard of education was not as a result of systemic failure, but as a result
of teaching, insisting that teachers’ quality must be properly checked if
Nigeria must get its education system right.
Also, the Chairman of Teachers
Service Board (TSB), in Kaduna State, Adamu Makadi said that teachers earn
about 27% higher than their peers in the other sectors of the state government
civil service.
The NTI boss and Adamu Makadi
spoke at a One-Day Workshop on Teachers Issues In Conflict and Protracted
Crisis Settings: Documenting the Effectiveness of the Kaduna Teacher Reforms.
According to Makadi, before the
education reforms in Kaduna, it was discovered that. nothing really was wrong
with the education system, but with the teachers, hence the need for the reform
to check the recruitment, deployment and retention of teachers in the state.
“There is nothing wrong with
our system of education, the problem is the quality of teachers, so Kaduna
State Government took the bull by the horns by initiating a reform in the
educational sector, particularly in the areas of recruitment, deployment and
retention of teachers.”
“The recruitment exercise has
been digitalised and adverts are open to all able and qualified candidates to
apply, which has been working for us perfectly. The reform has enabled us to
recruit and deploy based on their qualifications and competencies to see where
they can best fit in. We also deploy teachers based on proximity to their
places of residence.”
“The State Government under
Senator Uba Sani has done a lot towards ensuring that competent and qualified
teachers are retained in Kaduna State through provision of incentives including
special allowances over other civil servants. For instance, if you are a
teacher on a particular salary grade level and step, compared to your colleague
who is not a teacher but in the same grade level and step, you will discover
that teachers earn about 27% higher than other civil servants,” he said.
Professor Oladele Akogun, a
University Don and Regional Research Director, the International Rescue
Committee (IRC), Nigeria & South Sudan, said Teachers should be treated
better than Medical Doctors to get the education system right.
He said, that apart from the
challenge with the educators (teachers), Nigeria also needs to check its
education policies, as the country cannot achieve its desired education
standards if policies and practices are at variance.
According to him, a situation
where the country has a beautiful policy of free and compulsory education for
up to 18 years, but in practice, it is not being implemented cannot yield the
desired result.
On the challenges of teachers,
Professor Akogun said, teachers must be handled carefully the way Medical
Doctors are treated, insisting that there was danger in handling teachers with
kid gloves as doing so could affect generations unborn.
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