Employment of 500,000 teachers will not solve Education Problems in Nigeria

The Chairman of Exam Ethics Marshal International, Ike Onyechere, has said the the Federal Government’s plan to employ 500,000 teachers will not help improve the quality of education in the country. Onyechere told the News Agency of Nigeria in Abuja on Sunday that government should focus more on teacher quality rather than quantity.

He is also the National Coordinator, Joint Education Stakeholders Action Coalition. Onyechere said: “Many of our teachers are people who are in that profession for the time being to see whether something better will come up. “In those days, what used to happen was that the brightest people were retained in teaching. “Yes, we are fighting unemployment but employing 500,000 graduates as teachers and them N30,000 will even worsen our situation. “It may be better to employ 100,000 graduates and make sure they earn the highest level of salary among their peers; people will go back to teaching. “If you go to countries that are really progressing based on their intellectual ability, you will find out that the highest paid people are in the teaching profession“You find out that people with PhD they still go and teach in the elementary school and they are paid more than someone with PhD working in the bank. “So, we have to look at quality not quantity and we have to motivate them financially.”

Commenting on teacher training, Onyechere said that strong measures must be put in place to make it mandatory for teachers to attend trainings and receive certificates at the end of the training. Onyechere said he had observed that some teachers attend training just to collect Estacode and some never participate in the programme after registering their names on the attendance list. He said that in some states where he had conducted training, it was mandatory for all teachers to pass a diagnostic test at the end of the training in order to earn their certificate of attendance. He expressed regret that many teachers do not appreciate the enormous and important role they play in the life of the child and society at large. According to Onyechere, the Teacher Training Curriculum does not contain anything on the technical skills for conducting examinations, adding that it concentrates solely on the integrity aspect of the evaluation or assessment of the exam process.