Governor Nasir el-Rufa’i of Kaduna state has disclosed that competency tests for secondary school teachers will soon be conducted across the state to remove incompetent ones.
This is just as the State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB) said it would continue to screen teachers and monitor classrooms to weed out quacks and unqualified teachers. Kaduna state government conducted similar test for the over 30,000 primary school teachers in the state last year, following which 21,780 that failed to obtain 70 per cent mark were sacked and replaced with newly recruited 25,000 teachers.
Speaking yesterday on his twitter handle, @GovKaduna, el-Rufai noted that the state was committed to restoring the integrity of the teaching profession. He also revealed that the state government has decided to pay urban teachers in the state 27.5 per cent higher than average civil servants, while rural teachers will earn 32.5 per cent higher than their other civil service colleagues to attract the best to the teaching profession.
“We are doing our best to restore the integrity of the teaching profession. We have finished tests for primary school teachers and we are going to administer competency tests for secondary school teachers,” the governor stated. According to SUBEB Chairman, Malam Nasiru Umar, the measure is to ensure that quacks and incompetent teachers do not find their way back into classrooms.
He disclosed that despite completing the re-screening and induction exercise for the newly recruited teachers, the state government intends to go after incompetent teachers. “Even if you scale through, we are going to fish you out in the classrooms, 15, 000 applicants were given probational letter of appointment but not all of them will qualify. The essence of the applicants writing the acceptance letter in presence of the panel was to filtrate those who might have come in through the back door,” he said.