From Noah Ebije, Kaduna
The Kaduna State Teachers Service Board (TSB) has disclosed that teachers in Kaduna State earn about 27% higher than their peers in the other sectors of the state’s civil service.
A university don and Regional Research Director, International Rescue Committee (IRC), Nigeria & South Sudan, Prof. Oladele Akogun, argued that teachers should be treated better than medical doctors to get the education system right.
Chairman of the Board Mr Adamu Makade and Professor Akogun spoke at a one-day workshop on Teachers Issues In Conflict and Protracted Crisis Settings: Documenting the Effectiveness of the Kaduna Teacher Reforms.
The Teachers Service Board (TSB) chairman said that prior to the education reforms in Kaduna, it was discovered that nothing really was wrong with the education system but with the teachers, hence the need for the reform to check the recruitment, deployment and retention of teachers in Kaduna State.
According to him, “There is nothing wrong with our system of education; the problem was the quality of teachers, so the Kaduna State Government took the bull by the horns by initiating reform in the educational sector, particularly in the areas of recruitment, deployment, and retention of teachers.
“The recruitment exercise has been digitalised, and adverts are open to all able and qualified candidates to apply, which has been working for us perfectly. The reform has enabled us to recruit and deploy based on their qualifications and competencies to see where they can best fit in. We also deploy teachers based on proximity to their places of residence.
“The State Government under the governor, Senator Uba Sani, has done a lot towards ensuring that competent and qualified teachers are retained in Kaduna State through the provision of insensitive, including special allowances over other civil servants. For instance, if you are a teacher on a particular salary grade level and step, compared to your colleague who is not a teacher but in the same grade level and step, you will discover that teachers earn about 27% higher than other civil servants,” he said.
Earlier in his presentation, the Director General of the National Teacher Institute (NTI), Professor Garba Maitafsir, said the falling standards of education are not a result of systemic failure but a result of teaching.
While lamenting that, as a lecturer at the university, he came across a PhD student who could not write his name properly, Professor Maitafsir said teacher quality must be properly checked if Nigeria must get its education system right.
According to Professor Akogun, apart from the challenge with educators, Nigeria also needs to check its education policies, adding that the country cannot achieve its desired education standards if policies and practices are at variance.
He said that a situation where the country has a beautiful policy of free and compulsory education for up to 18 years, but in practice, it is not implemented, cannot yield the desired result.
Speaking on the challenges of teachers, Professor Akogun said teachers must be handled carefully the way medical doctors are treated, arguing that the result of handling teachers shabbily is more deadly for a nation than that of teachers, as the repercussions affect entire generations.