Group urges El-Rufai to allow retraining of incompetent teachers for 12 months

Says decision to sack them is draconian, destructive 

A group, the Mainan Zazzau Communication Committee, has implored the Kaduna State Governor, Malam Nasir el-Rufai, to allow the retraining of almost 22,000 teachers who failed the competency test for 12 months.

It described the decision of the state government to dislodge the teachers, having failed in the exams as draconian and destructive solution to reformation of education in the state.

The group said a window of between six to 12 months should be given to the teachers to visit relevant institutions to update and hone their skills, while those who failed to meet up with the requisite qualifications may then be dismissed “on the condition that they must be paid all entitlements specified during their terms of service.”

The Secretary of the group, Ibrahim Adamu Zango, in a statement made available to newsmen in Kaduna, said the state government should have channelled its energy on reforming the dilapidating structure of the public schools instead of deliberating on how to purge under-performing teachers in mass.
 
He said: “The effort to make public schools better must not stop there. We know that till date, pupils in 50 per cent of public schools in the state sit on the floor due to absence of furniture. Most of the 4,250 public primary schools have no doors, roofs and windows. There are also no water and toilet facilities.

Some of the schools are heavily over-populated with more than the required number of students. All these are fundamental problems that militate against good education for the teeming masses.

“Disengaging primary school teachers under the guise of education sector reforms was a huge setback to the rule of law and natural justice.”
 
He, however, called on the governor to toe the path of sanity and pragmatism, just like his counterparts from other states, working towards retraining of their non-performing school teachers.

“Assessment tests recently carried out by several state governments notably Kano, Kaduna and Sokoto undoubtedly showed that teacher quality in public schools is at its lowest. But Kano and Sokoto governments have fashioned remedial programmes to train and re-train under-qualified teachers,” Zango stated.