Nigeria has resolved to engage qualified and licenced teachers as part of efforts to rid the system of their unqualified counterparts.
Mr Sonny Echono, Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Education, said this while monitoring the May Diet of the Teachers Professional Qualifying Examination (PQE) organised by the Teachers Registration Council of Nigeria (TRCN) in Abuja on Saturday.
“We are dead serious about implementing the policy and we are also working very hard to ensure that we also are ready.
“The first thing that is going to happen is that TRCN and NTI are compiling a database of qualified teachers, those that have been certified, those who have taken this examination who are unemployed” he said.
“And we are going to do it and even segregate them state by state and make them available to each state’’ he added.
He said it was going to be the starting point, that anybody who has been certified as a teacher should be employed because there is no excuse for that.
He added: “We have a huge dearth of qualified teachers, so all those that we have should be engaged to work, and all those who are not qualified we are sorry, we have to move them out of the system.
“Yes there may be some issues relating to the number, that is why we want to ramp up the production process, we are taking so many measure.
“And enforcement is very key; we have taken two steps towards ensuring enforcement. We have upgraded what we call quality assurance department. It used to be called inspectorate, we now have state offices in all the states of the federation.’’
The second step, he said was re-establish the secondary education commission.
MM/as/APA