The Teachers’ Registration Council of Nigeria (TRCN) has revealed plans to translate its modules and questions of the Professional Qualifying Examination (PQE) into Arabic.
TRCN Registrar, Professor Josiah Ajiboye revealed this to EduCeleb.com as part of measures to include Arabic medium only teachers and teacher trainees in public and private schools to register and get their TRCN licence.
Since 2017, the TRCN had been conducting the PQE for teachers and prospective teachers to be qualified as statutorily stated in the law.
Prior to then, teachers who registered earlier could be licenced without the exam.
The TRCN boss had in 2018 said that only around 2 million teachers are qualified having met this condition.
He added that there had been up 80% compliance by teachers in schools just as teacher training institutions in the country have been cooperating with the agency to enrol students in their final semesters towards obtaining the teaching licence.
The education professor noted that getting those taught only in Arabic qualified had been particularly challenging for the teaching profession regulatory agency and it was already seeking the help of an unnamed Arabic institute for that translation assignment.
“We have a benchmark in the modules we have developed for various categories of teachers.
“Some of our prospective teachers who are Arabic medium only, we have a problem with them. These people were trained using Arabic language purely.
“We are working on that to make sure we get an Arabic institute to make sure they change all the modules into Arabic and also the question items as well. ”
EduCeleb.com earlier reported that the TRCN has fixed 7th and 8th June, 2019 for the May 2019 diet of the PQE after it was postponed last week due to the national environmental sanitation exercise.
About 30,000 prospective teachers would be sitting for this first half of the exam in 2019. The second diet holds around October.
He reiterated that after the December 2019 deadline set by the National Council on Education, unqualified teachers would be flushed out of the school system.
“When we do this, it will improve the quality of our teachers. We would now know who and who is teaching our children. It’s no longer going to be an all comers’ affair anymore.”
