The Teachers Registration Council of Nigeria (TRCN) has conducted the Professional Qualifying Examinations (PQE) for 11,629 teachers across the country.
The TRCN’s Acting Director of Certification and Licensing, Dr Jacinta Ogboso, disclosed this in Abuja while supervising the examination at SASCON International School.
She said a total of 982 participated in the exercise in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).
Ogboso praised the conduct of the exercise as very smooth because TRCN started the exam since 2017 and kept improving on the processes.
On the fight against malpractice in the conduct of the exercise, she said TRCN had put in place a process of accreditation through a platform that the ICT department had developed.
She added that the platform was able to detect the actual people who registered for the examination, to avoid impersonation of candidates.
”We started PQE in October 2017 and since then we’ve been having it; we’ve been having two batches except in 2018/ 2019 where we have three batches.
”We have the May/June Diet and the October/ November Diet and this is the second for this year.
“We have a total of 11,639 candidates registered for this examination nationwide and in FCT we have 982 candidates who are registered at this centre.
”We started accreditation at 8 a.m. and we are still on as we have them in batches.
”We accredited them, using our App which we use to ensure that we eliminate some forms of impersonation for those who are still very hardened,” she said.
Commenting on the importance of the examination, Ogboso said teaching was a profession and hence must be regularly used for effective results.
She said that teachers had three opportunities to write the examination so as to get a licence to teach in the country as well as other parts of the world.
She said that the FCT had the highest application followed by Lagos and Anambra, while Ondo and Kaduna had equal numbers of registered teachers.
“Teaching is a profession and one of the features of a profession is that the profession must have a regulatory body for people who will practise in that profession; they must, apart from their academic qualification, write the professional qualifying examination.
”So, we no longer depend on the academic qualification.
“After their academic qualification, we are sure that the people who are going into the classroom to teach our children are actually professionally qualified so that is why this exam is important.
”If you do not pass this exams, you will not be registered by TRCN and once you are not registered and identified as a teacher by TRCN, you will not be registered as a teacher in Nigeria and in anywhere in the world.
She added that majority of Nigerian teachers were aware of the importance of the certification and hence rushing to write the examination in order to get licensed, to operate as a professional teacher.
She, therefore, promised that the results of the examinations which started since Thursday, would be ready within two weeks after the examination.
“We have done our best to ensure that we don’t have that crowd but you have the challenge of our people not sticking to the time given them.
”We have to cope with the challenge of candidates who were given 9 a.m. as time for their examination but will come by 7 a.m. and when this happens, they will not want to wait but join others slated for 7 a.m. to write.
‘We are also making an effort to digitalise this examination in the next few years to make it easy for the teachers,” she said.
She, however, was hopeful that every teacher in Nigeria would be certified as registered, to be able to teach in the classroom.
Speaking with some of the candidates, Mr Mwuaga Tavershima, a teacher from a private school, said that the examination was a huge success.
He called for the decentralisation of the examination by creating CBT centres in each local government to control the crowd.
Also, Miss Sandra Ojoko commended the conduct of the examination while hoping to get good results after the exercise.
