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•CEO TRCN, Professor Josiah Ajiboye
The Federal Government has insisted that the December 31st, 2019 deadline remains sacrosanct for all teachers in the country to register and get certification from the Teachers’ Registration Council of Nigeria or get booted out of the system.
Registrar and Chief Executive of Teachers’ Registration Council of Nigeria (TRCN), Professor Josiah Ajiboye, spoke in Abuja during the weekend at an interactive session with members of the Education Correspondents Association of Nigeria (ECAN) on activities of the Council in the outgoing year.
He also revealed that the Council has successfully registered over 2 million teachers while about 1.8 of them are captured in a clean databank after the initial database of the Council crashed sometimes ago.
Ajiboye further disclosed that a Teacher’s Information System (TIS), has also been created containing the names and details of all the teachers so far registered by the Council.
He recalled that the National Council on Education (NCE) in 2016, set the December 31 deadline, saying that the decision was to the effect that the TRCN should be able to remove quackery from the teaching profession.
He said the era of using teaching jobs as political patronage was over, emphasizing that all those who are not qualified to teach in the nation’s schools would be weeded out.
He said: “Deadline was set at that time and certain things were put in place, especially for those who were not qualified; because the fear was about those who were not qualified, to be able to correct their deficiencies.
“You can do a postgraduate diploma in education. The NCE also approved for TRCN to run in institutions, what they called professional diploma in education, for those who were not qualified to enroll for either the PGDE or PDE to balance their degrees in cognate areas,” he said.
Ajiboye added that a long number of years have been given for the unqualified teachers to remedy their deficiencies, stressing that in 2017, the position of the government was reviewed at the NCE meeting in Kano, reiterating the position that December 31, 2019, would be the last day.
He disclosed that the same position was reiterated by the Minister of Education, Malam Adamu Adamu, at the National Council of Education meeting in Port Harcourt, challenging the TRCN to be prepared for the effective monitoring as from January 2020.
“I want to assure Nigerians that we are going to start our monitoring for compliance effective from January 2020.