No TRCN licence, no recruitment, says registrar

PETER DADA

The Teachers Registration Council of Nigeria has declared that any teacher without the licence of the council will not be employed in the teachers’ recruitment exercise that will soon be embarked upon by the Federal Government.

He said the TRCN’s licence would be one of the major requirements for anyone to be employed as a teacher.

The TRCN Registrar, Prof.  Olusegun Ajiboye, made this declaration while delivering a lecture at the Adeyemi College of Education in Ondo.

In the lecture titled, ‘The teacher as a professional in time perspective,’ the TRCN boss said the council was committed to the standardisation of the teaching profession in Nigeria.

He said, “No person without the licence of TRCN will be allowed to teach in the classroom again. This present government is planning to recruit 500,000 teachers and only those who are licensed by the TRCN will be recruited. We will make sure we send quacks out of the teaching profession.”

Ajiboye, who lamented the slow pace of development in the country’s education system, stated that teachers were not motivated.

Comparing Nigeria’s education with Finland’s, he said the education level of the two countries were low in the early 1960s, adding that Finland is one of the countries in the world with the best teachers.

According to him, “Nigeria and Finland are operating a similar system of education and yet our education system cannot match that of Finland despite the well-articulated policies.

“What lesson can we learn from the history of Finland that will help reform our system to restore the lost glory of Nigerian teachers? Nigeria has no reason whatsoever to be left behind because we have everything it takes to develop our educational system.”

In his remarks, the Provost of the ACE, Prof. Olukoya Ogen, stated that any behaviour that puts the teaching profession into disrepute among academic staff in the college would no longer be condoned in the institution.

Ogen, who was represented at the occasion by the Deputy Provost, Dr. Samuel Akintunde, urged the academic staff members to “sit up and do away with insincerity of purpose to fully embrace best practices in this profession in order to truly belong to the team that could fulfil the mandate of our profession.”

The provost also commended the TRCN on the teachers tribunal found in the act of the council, saying it would weed out unworthy and unscrupulous elements among teachers, and where necessary, send them to jail for their misdemeanour.