Colleges of Education shoudn’t be dumping grounds

The poor quality of teachers at the basic level of education in Nigeria has been a public discourse, particularly in the past two and half decades. The direct consequence of this unfortunate situation is the turning out of very low products from schools. Sometimes, certain pupils and students even know more than their teachers. Not too long ago, for instance, only one out of a total of 1,599 teachers selected from different schools across Kaduna State to write a test scored 75 percent. Results of the test conducted in Mathematics and Basic Literacy also showed that 1,300 teachers scored below 25 percent.
When the same test was conducted for 1,800 pupils, the larger percent of them equally failed woefully. The abysmal performance of pupils in the test was predictable given the fact that their teachers also failed the test. However, there is no excuse for the teachers to have failed a test which contents were part of the basic knowledge expected of instructors at that level.
There are reports that some products of the Nigerian Certificate of Education (NCE) programme organised by the National Teachers’ Institute (NTI) to upgrade holders of TC II to obtain the minimum teaching qualification can hardly write even a letter. The conduct of examinations in the programme has allegedly been grossly bastardised. The contents and structure of the distance learning programme of NTI need to be reviewed and strengthened. But more disturbing than the poor quality of teachers is, perhaps, the wrong approach which policy makers in the education sector have sought in the past to tackle the crisis.
In the first quarter of 2015, for example, the then minister of education Alhaji Ibrahim Shekarau told Nigerians that the federal government had concluded plans to make first degree the minimum teaching qualification in Nigeria. He made this declaration while receiving visiting Finnish ambassador to Nigeria Pirjo Suomela-Chowdhury. The envoy had told the minister that all teachers in Finland have a minimum of master’s degree because teaching in their country “is a highly competitive profession due to huge interest by too many qualified people”.
A similar pronouncement was made in 2011 by an erstwhile minister of state for education, Kenneth Gbagi. He declared that the federal government had concluded arrangements, then, to phase out the NCE offered by Colleges of Education (COEs) in the country. Like Shekarau, the only reason advanced then by Gbagi for the proposed phasing out of the NCE programme and its replacement with a bachelor’s degree as the minimum teaching qualification was that the quality of teachers produced by the COEs was too poor to cater for the basic education needs of the country.
As once mentioned on this page recently, the problem which the ministers of education most often misconstrue, is more with the process (i.e. the NCE programme) that produces poor quality teachers than it is assumed to be with the product (i.e. the certificate). Neither the scrapping of NCE nor the raising of the teaching minimum teaching qualification is actually a workable solution to the problem.
The scrapping, too, of the Teachers’ Grade Two Certificate programme (TC II) in the country has been described as a technical misstep that largely accounts for most of the challenges bedeviling teacher-education in the country today. This policy summersault has had its negative impact on the professionalisation of teaching in Nigeria.
In recent years, the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) further worsened the already bad situation with teacher education in the country by turning COEs, like the polytechnics, in to dumping ground when it approved a lower cut-off mark of 150 for candidates seeking admission in to such institutions; as against the 180 cut-off points for universities. In the 1970s, I recall that when common entrance examination results were released, those who topped the list were the candidates usually selected and admitted in to teachers’ training colleges.
Although JAMB failed to give reasons for its actions, the only explanation that could be deduced is that the examination body rates COEs lower than universities in nearly all aspects, including the potential abilities of candidates that study in such institutions. If this is taken for granted to be true of JAMB’s position, it would seem to be a wrong judgment which has though become a widely believed public opinion in Nigeria.
Many people still think that brilliant UTME candidates should have no cause to go through NCE programmes as if the COEs that offer such courses were established to cater for candidates that lack the intellectual capacity to study in the universities. This belief, though erroneous, is a rather unfortunate perception, especially as it became the implied position of a public examination body like the JAMB.
Some Nigerians do not see COEs as institutions where only the exceptionally brilliant should be admitted because of the low premium placed on the colleges by government even though it is the sole proprietor of the COEs. These institutions receive smaller funding from the government. It is rather strange that the Federal Ministry of Education, the National Commission for Colleges of Education (NCCE) and the Teachers Registration Council of Nigeria (TRCN) have over the years failed to challenge JAMB’s policy of admitting candidates with lower cut-off marks in the UTME results in to COEs.
Again, if JAMB were to be given the benefit of the doubt in its recently failed attempt to re-assign UTME candidates to institutions (including COEs) other than those of their choice, government would yet take the larger portion of the blame for failing to make the teaching profession attractive in practical terms. Of course, young boys and girls are scared of seeking admission into COEs because of the obvious reality that the job, for now, is with little career prospect in Nigeria.
The ideal, in the opinion of this writer, is for JAMB to have unified cut-off points for all tertiary institutions. It makes sense that if all the candidates collectively wrote the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME), the cut-off marks for the institutions into which admissions are sought should equally be unified. This may be one concrete way of re-assuring Nigerians that COEs have not been turned by JAMB in to a dumping ground.
While no nation really rises above the quality of its teachers, we pray that Allah (SWT) guides our leaders to reposition teacher education in the country, amin.