28,000 Teachers Passed Professional Qualifying Examination Conducted In July – TRCN

BY AGATHA OGBONNAYA, ABUJA – Over 28,000 teachers representing 75 percent passed the Teachers Registration Council of Nigeria (TRCN) Professional Qualifying Examination that took place in July, 2020.

Registrar/Chief Executive of TRCN, Prof. Josiah Olusegun Ajiboye, who announced this when he received in audience the executives of the Education Correspondents Association of Nigeria (ECAN) on Thursday in Abuja, however said that 9,246 candidates failed in the Batch A Professional Qualifying Exam.

Ajiboye said the exam witnessed the participation of teachers from the 36 states and Federal Capital Territory (FCT), adding that candidates from Kaduna and Rivers states also took part in the exercise after the required permits were secured from the state governments.

According to him; “On the whole, about 44,363 candidates registered for the examination but the total examined was 37,340 candidates. Due to the prevalence of Covid-19, a large number of candidates could not move around or write the exam.

“We have about 7,023 candidates that didn’t write the exam. Majority of these people have actually written the exam before. They have been noted and what we are going to do is to allow them to write the exam at the next available opportunity.

“On the whole, 28,094 candidates passed the exam, which is 75.24 percent while a total of 9, 246 candidates failed, giving a percentage of 24.76 percent,” he said.

Lagos State with 3,574 candidates had the highest number of candidates that sat for the TRCN July’s professional qualifying exam while Ekiti State with 235 candidates had the least number.

The next batch of the Professional Qualifying Exam is expected to take place in early November, 2020.

The TRCN chief executive also said that the performance recorded in the exam was encouraging, adding that the examination was introduced as a gate-keeping measure for the teaching profession.

Ajiboye further said; “We can see that it is a fair result- 75.24 percent is not bad. Gradually we are beginning to see that the pre-service teachers are getting familiarised with the use of computers. Initially when we started the failure rate was very high.

“The major reason we introduced the teacher qualifying exam is that we felt it is not possible for everybody to just walk in to the profession and just register like that without writing an exam. There is no profession that does not have gate-keeping measures,” he said.

Ajiboye commended the new requirement in Colleges of Education that makes it mandatory for academic staff to have a TRCN registration certificate before they can be promoted.

Earlier, the Chairman of ECAN, Mr Chuks Ukwuatu, said the association decided to pay a visit to the Registrar of TRCN to express appreciation to the agency for sponsoring a capacity building workshop for ECAN a few weeks ago.

Ukwuatu assured of the readiness of members of the ECAN to always collaborate with the TRCN to achieve its mandate.