From Fred Ezeh, Abuja
Teacher’s Registration Council of Nigeria (TRCN), at the weekend, restated its determination to sanitize the teaching profession by organizing Teacher’s Professional Qualifying Examination (PQE) 11,629 candidates, being second batch of the 2022 exercise.
The exercise took at the SASCON International School, Maitama, Abuja, with the FCT having the highest number of candidates with 982 teachers. Lagos and Anambra followed, respectively, while Ondo and Kaduna had equal number of registered candidates.
TRCN’s Director of Examination and Licencing, Dr. Jacinta Ogboso, who monitored the exercise in Abuja, stressed the importance of the examination and certification, asking those who are yet to sit for the examination and get certified to do so as quickly as possible before the window closes.
She said that apart from academic qualifications, teachers professional qualifying examination is important for teachers to obtain licenses for their practice.
“We no longer depend on the academic qualification to become a certified professional teacher. After the academic qualification, we want to ensure that people who are going to the classroom to teach our children are actually professionally qualified. That is why this examination is important.
“If you do not pass this examination, you would not be registered by TRCN as a professional teacher, and once you are not registered and identified as a professional teacher, you would not be recognised as a teacher in Nigeria and anywhere in the world.
“So that is why this examination is very necessary and crucial. No professional qualifying examination, no teacher registration certificate, and no licensing by Teachers Registration Council of Nigeria,” she said.
Ogboso, however, noted that candidates who fail the PQE are given three opportunities to write, adding that no teacher who went through teacher education should fail the examination more than twice because it covers professional skills and the foundations of education that are taught in colleges of education and faculties of education in all the teacher education programmes.
“So, everybody who has gone through those teacher education programmes should not have a problem passing this examination.
“The result should be ready within two weeks. After this examination, the result will be extracted and analysed, and the management will set the cut-off mark and then we’ll look at it. There are processes in every civil service so the processes of approving the results will be done and then the result be released to the public,” she explained.