The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation’s (UNESCO) aspiration is to enthrone quality education, especially in the basic education level, in order to achieve a core aspect of its education for all (EFA) goals.
In developed economies, as part of efforts to grow a critical mass of its population to compete in today’s world, efforts are made to improve access to basic education. But the same cannot be said of Nigeria which currently has about eight million children, 60 percent of them girls, still out of school and won’t have the skill they need to get jobs and build secure, stable futures.
With the increase in the rate of out of school children in Nigeria and the shortage of teachers at all levels of education, the pressure to hire many teachers to meet set goals become imperative toward meeting the EFA and MDGs goal.
Basic education is still characterised by low net enrolment. School infrastructure has not caught up with increasing enrolment as reports document many pupils sitting on the floor for classes and some learning under trees.
We see teachers failing tests that their students can pass, exemplified by cases in Kaduna State that led to the governor Nasir El-Rufai sacking and replacing them.
From all indications, the quest to actually drive the access to basic education boils down to capacity of teachers. Teachers are a critical education resource in every country. From early childhood programmes through primary and secondary school, the presence of qualified, well-motivated and supported teachers is vital for student learning. Effective teaching strongly influences what and how much students achieve in school.
For several years, the quality of teachers and other academic infrastructure at the level of basic education has been a major challenge. Despite the Universal Basic Education (UBE) scheme, many states maintain a truly pathetic profile in the form and content of their curricula.
This is hardly surprising, as many of them have consistently failed to access the Federal Government’s counterpart funding arrangement that offers a clear rescue path. They are unwilling to provide the matching funds for the UBE intervention and are therefore on the run from the generosity of the Federal Government.
The Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) has repeatedly lamented the failure of state governments to access and use the funds. This is in addition to states which collect it and divert same to political patronage, or which put their counterpart funds as bait to draw Federal Government support and quickly pocket theirs.
Industry experts in the education sector observe that for Nigeria to bridge the teachers gap, 39,239 qualified teachers should be engaged annually for Universal Basic Education (UBE) up to year 2020 and 80,364 for adult and non-formal education.
In addition, there is a need to increase the size of the teaching workforce in primary education. This implies creating almost one million new primary teaching positions in the next few years.
Peter Okebukola, former executive Secretary National Universities commission maintains that to improve the provision of good quality education that consist an adequate pool of teachers to match reasonable pupil/teacher ratios, a lot of things has to change.
“We need to reformat teacher education. The poor quality of teachers in the Nigerian school system is a major force steering education in the wrong direction”, he said.
Until our teachers are better trained and well-motivated, all efforts to improve the quality of the education system will be severely compromised. In the quest to increase teacher quantity, all manner of persons and all manner of part-time and sandwich programmes (mainly to generate income), are part of the current menu of teacher training.
Stakeholders in the education sector say that the National Teachers Institute, the colleges of education and the faculties of education are blameworthy in unleashing the army of poorly-trained teachers on our educational system. Reformatting teacher education means major curriculum overhaul. It means improving the quality of the processing of the poor quality intake into our teacher preparation institutions. It also means periodic re-certification of teachers.
“We should begin to train a new breed of 21st century teachers who are steeped in the use of modern methods of instruction and are at the cutting edge of knowledge in their subject matter.
“We should provide a curriculum running from basic through higher education that will lead students to develop 21st century skills and make them acquire values for good citizenship”, they said.
KELECHI EWUZIE
