Registrar of Teachers Registration Council (TRCN), Prof Josiah Ajiboye, said 11,350 candidates on Saturday participated in the first batch of the Professional Qualifying Examination (PQE) across the country.
Prof Ajiboye, who stated this while monitoring the exercise at Sascon International School, Maitama, Abuja, said reports from across the country showed that the exam recorded tremendous improvement in terms of participation and the accreditation process.
Ajiboye, who was accompanied by the Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of Education, David Adejo, said: “Well, generally, all over the country, we have about 11,350 candidates who are writing the exam, with Lagos State having the highest with 1,500 plus candidates, followed by Kano State and the FCT; then you have a state like Kebbi with the lowest number of candidates for the examination.”
“There has been a lot of improvement with regards to even the accreditation procedure, because part of what we did was to develop an App to be able to accredit candidates; and this is working perfectly well. We’re able to check your name, your passport photograph will also appear and everything like that, so we know that the people that are writing the exam are those who actually applied, so, it’s been going on smoothly,” he said.
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He noted that the examination which is conducted in all the states of the federation, started on Wednesday and was concluded in some states on Friday.
Speaking on the Federal Government’s effort to weed out unqualified teachers, he said one of the major processes of weeding out quacks in the teaching profession is the PQE as it is now obvious that nobody can get the TRCN licence without passing a provisional qualifying examination.
He said, “Even if you’re a professor in the university, you just have to write this examination before you can get the certificate and the licence. And another thing that we are doing in that regard is also school monitoring and we also have processes for checking our certificates, the authenticity of those certificates.”
