By Ayodele Oni
The general saying that private schools are better than the public ones, is being threatened with discovery by a regulatory body that majority of those private institutions are being run by illiterates.
For years now it has become the practice of parents to enroll their siblings in privately owned institutions, especially nursery and primary schools in the believe that they are well equiped to raise those children.
It has even become a sort of competition among parents with some of them having the notion that parents with children in public schools are the poor, and cannot afford fees of privately owned ones.
This has led to astronomical rise in number of privately owned institutions to the extent that any available buildings are being turned to private learning centres.
Now, the Federal Government’s regulatory body for teaching in Nigeria, the Teachers Registration Council of Nigeria, (TRCN), has declared that 70 per cent of private school teachers in Southwest states are not qualified to teach.
The South-west states in Nigeria are Lagos, Osun, Ogun, Ondo, Oyo and Ekiti.
The council’s registrar, Prof. Josiah Ajiboye who noted that the culprits were not teachers, but cheaters, added that they don’t only cheat the pupils/students but the system in its entirety.
Speaking in Abuja at the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding, (MoU) between the Council and INSTILL Education, Ajiboye revealed that contrary to several speculations about the Southwest and its teachers of private schools, 70 per cent had been discovered unqualified.
Lamenting that 70 per cent of the unqualified teachers lacked the prerequisites to be registered by the Council, the TRCN boss stated that a large number of teachers in Nigeria had never been exposed to training and had been using outdated equipment for illustration.
“They are not registrable with the TRCN. So that is to tell you that there is a big gap. So you cannot call them teachers but cheaters.
“So we are looking into the future to fill up that gap like it’s done in South Africa.”
He said signing the MoU was aimed at equipping Nigerian teachers with 21st-century skills that would ultimately support teacher professional development and learning outcomes in Nigeria and Africa in general.
