By Gom Mirian
The Nigerian Teachers Registration Council (TRCN) on Thursday signed a memorandum of Understanding, (MoU) with Instill Education, a South African-based educational organization to improve the skills of teachers working in Nigeria.
The Registrar, Prof Josiah Ajiboye, who signed the document in Abuja with his management team, said the pilot phase of implementing the MoU with eight weeks of capacity building will soon begin.
Mr. Ajiboye said the MoU has three main elements; it is a prospective teacher, integration of prospective and incumbent teachers, and a development programme.
He is optimistic that the involvement of Instill Education would bridge the gap between pre-service and in-service teachers.
“With regards to our teachers, if you look at what we have said here today, three major components actually were identified: the pre-service teachers, even integrating pre-service with the in-service. We have looked at pre-service teachers, the in-service teachers and their training programmes and we have been able to see that there is a gap,” he said.
The TRCN chief lamented that many teachers employed in private schools in Nigeria today do not have the a priori qualification of being called a teacher.
According to him, a study conducted by the council found that the number of private school teachers in the southwest more than 90% were found to be unqualified and not registerable with the TRCN.
“So, these people are not registerable with TRCN because they don’t possess the requisite qualification that will allow us to register them. There’s a big gap there. Instill maybe looking in the future on how to fill that gap. Like they are doing in South Africa; they may also, but the major component of this MOU is about the in-service teachers. How do we go about capacitating these in-service teachers, upskilling them.
“And that’s what Instill is coming with; they are upcoming with their expertise and technology to be able to help us to do this kind of capacitation for our teachers. We’ve been talking over time, about mandatory continuing professional development for teachers, where teachers are going to take certain capacity development programmes and they will get points and this will count towards the renewal of their license as well as their promotion,” he added.
Also, Mr. Tom Parry, operations manager at Instill Education, said training he receives from his organization always ends with a hand-on component to give teachers the opportunity to practice and understand.
Parry said the MoU will focus on the professional development of in-service teachers, and in the future his organization will combine in-service and in- service programmes into one micro assessment department so teachers can continue to learn and assess themselves.
while adding that he would like to merge, Parry said: “we can provide quality, affordable, government recognized hand-on training that is relevant, hand-on in the classroom, and helps you achieve better learning outcomes.
“Beyond the simple training processes that we build into our platform, we also think about the incentive structures. So, this is where we’re talking more about this workforce development platform. Teachers, I mean, there are some teachers who will be incentivized simply to do training for the sake of getting better.
“But the reality is, many teachers have childcare or other care responsibilities, they have second jobs, they have other lives, they cannot always dedicate the time needed to do it just for the goodwill of it just for the love of training,” he said.
Parry lamented that 90 per cent of African learners cannot read by the end of primary school, and that 30% of primary school teachers and 50% of secondary school teachers are unqualified.
He added that it is just the nature of the system and not an indictment of it, and without recognizing these realities, we cannot start to address them.
Earlier, Mr. Ugo-Ali Lawrence, director of Planning, Research and Statistics, said the council met with representatives of Instill Education for the first time on 14th November 2022 and proposed to train Nigerian teachers.
Lawrence said since 2015, the organization has delivered over 1.5 million hours of professional development, coaching and mentoring sessions to about 100,000 teachers and school leaders across 5 countries namely, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, Uganda and India.
