Nigeria has a lot to learn from how teachers are trained in Finland as Africa’s most populous nation’s educational system remains under negative criticism due to the quality of its products, a function of the quality of teachers in the system.
On January 08, 2018 teachers in Kaduna had embarked upon an indefinite strike meant to force Nasir El-Rufai, the state’s governor to rescind his decision to sack over 20,000 public primary school teachers for failing a competency test in June, 2017. However, 11 days later the National Union of Teachers (NUT) directed its members in public primary schools in Kaduna state to end their strike and return to the classroom. This was because El-Rufai rescinded his decision.
Kaduna state is only a tip of the ice-berg. A senior staff at the Federal Ministry of Education, who insisted on anonymity pointed out that among the Northern states, Kaduna is the primus inter pares and if this level of incompetency was detected, then there is a bigger problem.
The biggest challenge is with public perception of teachers industry practitioners and analysts say. Teaching and teacher training colleges in most parts of Nigeria have been seen as for those who have failed due to low academic grades to meet the entry requirement into more competitive faculties, such as medicine, engineering, law, science, and economics among others. The lowering of entry level requirements into colleges of education sends out the wrong signal as well, tacitly saying lower grades are good enough.
Tunji Abimbola, director of education at TMAB Education Consulting and former special adviser to the Ogun State Governor on Education said that “for starters, teacher training curriculum is obsolete. I was awarded a bachelor’s degree in Education from the University of Ibadan over 30 years ago. Three decades on, the curriculum has not significantly changed. The education faculty of most Nigerian universities is construed as a dumping site for candidates rejected by other departments thought more ‘lucrative’.
This is different from what obtains in Finland. When Finland was going through a deep economic crisis, in 2015, there were financial pressures on schools, just as there were on the rest of the public sector. But the five-year master’s degree for primary school teachers was not in question. Competition is fierce – only 7 percent of applicants in Helsinki were accepted 2015, leaving more than 1,400 disappointed.
The high-level training is the basis for giving young teachers in Finland a great deal of autonomy to choose what methods they use in the classroom, in contrast to Nigeria, which is somewhere between administration and giving tests to students.
In Finland, teachers are largely free from external requirements such as inspection, standardised testing and government control; school inspections were scrapped in the 1990s.
Leena Krokfors, professor of teaching at Helsinki University, says “teachers need to have this high-quality education so they really do know how to use the freedom they are given, and learn to solve problems in a research-based way,” Krokfors says. “The most important thing we teach them is to take pedagogical decisions and judgments for themselves.”
Education data report published by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) in February 2016 shows that the country had 62,406 public primary schools in 2014 with a total enrolment of 23 million children.
These schools have 574,579 teachers resulting in an average teacher to student ratio of 1 to 40 comparable to what is obtainable in most parts of Africa but twice higher than what is obtained in Europe and America and even most parts of Asia.
The high student teacher ratio means that most students in these classes are not getting enough attention from teachers since the classes are overcrowded.
This poor attention is compounded by the fact that only 11 percent of teachers in public primary schools actually have an educational degree while 56 percent have the minimum National Certificate of Education (NCE). The remaining 33 percent of teachers have other undefined qualifications.
STEPHEN ONYEKWELU
