GIFT EMMANUEL, Abuja
Executive Secretary of the National Commission for Colleges of Education (NCCE), Mr. Junaid Mohammed yesterday, blamed the high number of incompetent teachers in the nation’s teaching force on state governments who specialises in engaging the services of unqualified teachers.
Mr Mohammed disclosed this at the opening of a two-day training of verification teams for NEEDS assessment committee for Colleges of Education in Abuja.
He said despite qualified teachers available for employment, state governments settle for those that are less qualified for the job.
According to him, “the problem of dearth of quality teachers is not simply that quality teachers are not there but states are not employing the right kind of teachers. It’s not just the issue of dearth of quality teachers even where there are quality teachers they employ those that are not the right kind of teachers”.
He stressed that the NEEDS assessment of Colleges of Education would ensure all the needs of the colleges in terms of infrastructure, learning facilities and quality of teachers.
“The way it is going it’s by addressing the human resources in the Colleges of Education. Once they know what the problems are in the Colleges of Education in terms of quality of lecturers, then government will address that.
“First of all you know they need to determine what the needs are. In what areas do they have needs? Is it infrastructure, is it learning facilities, is it human resources? Whichever it is, government is ready to address them.
“And when the problems are solved, then Colleges of Education have no excuse than to produce quality teachers for the basic education sector.
“The NEEDS assessment would complement the accreditation exercise we do and the monitoring exercise we do everywhere.
” This is more comprehensive because the regulatory agency suffers lack of fund it cannot afford in a year audit all the institutions but this provides the opportunity to go round all the public Colleges of Education to do a NEEDS assessment and then report back to government” he said.
Chairperson of the NEEDS Assessment Committee for Colleges of Education Hindatu Umar Abdullahi, assured Nigerians that the report that the committee would submit would bring about a lot of revelations and also address the challenges in the Colleges of Education.
“The report that we will tender at the end of the exercise will help us in addressing some of the problems facing the Colleges of Education.
“So many things would be revealed about our Colleges of Education saying that the assessment would bring a new lease of life to teachers’ training in the country” she said.
She noted that the implementation of the committee’s report would commence immediately adding that the exercise would also look at the quality and quantity of lecturers at the Colleges of Education
