Iyela Ajayi, executive secretary of the National Senior Secondary Education Commission (NSSEC), says 40 per cent of the 2024 National Examination Council (NECO) candidates may not proceed to tertiary institutions for no credit in Mathematics and English Language.

Mr Ajayi said this on Tuesday in Calabar during his address at a five-day Capacity Building Workshop for Selected English Language and Mathematics Teachers within the South-South.

The executive secretary said the 2024 NECO result showed that about 61 per cent of the candidates had five credits and above, including Mathematics and English Language, while about 40 per cent could not credit both core subjects.

According to him, in the 2024 West African Examination Council (WAEC) examination, about 28 per cent also failed to credit English Language and Mathematics, meaning they may not access tertiary education.

He said that having a beautiful curriculum, state-of-the-art facilities, and infrastructure without trained teachers, who were the curriculum implementers, cannot develop the nation’s educational sector.

“There is no doubt that there is a teacher problem in Nigeria in terms of quality and quantity. This is why as a commission, we lay emphasis on the training and retraining of teachers, especially in the two core subjects.

“Teachers are the backbone of any educational system, so if you neglect the training and motivation of teachers, you have neglected education, and this is counter-productive.

“In the next five days, we will help to deepen the pedagogical knowledge of teachers, help them develop assessment skills and build a collaborative network,” he said.

Declaring the event open, Cross River’s Commissioner for Education, Stephen Odey, said the training was a rare privilege for the state and a welcome development.

Represented by Emmanuel Ikade, permanent secretary in the state’s Ministry of Education, Odey said many teachers had not attended any training since their engagement as teachers due to the paucity of funds.

He urged the teachers from the geo-political zone to take the training seriously and step it down to other teachers who were not opportune to be participants.

On his part, one of the resource persons, Samuel Nneji, from the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science Education, ESUT,  said the training was apt as it would empower teachers to impact positively on their students.

Mr Nneji, who works at the Enugu State University of Technology (ESUT), said the training was to build innovative teachers who could improvise even when the teaching conditions were not conducive.

“Teachers need innovative skills. Some of the skills with which we were taught have expired and can’t work in this generation, so we need innovative and creative teachers with strategies that can help the students learn better,” he said.