The Teachers Registration Council of Nigeria (TRCN) has conducted professional qualifying examinations for 11,639 teachers across the country.

The TRCN’s acting director of certification and licensing, Jacinta Ogboso, disclosed this in Abuja while supervising the examination.

“We have a total of 11,639 candidates registered for this examination nationwide, and in FCT, we have 982 candidates who are registered at this centre,” she said.

Ms Ogboso praised the conduct of the exercise as very smooth because TRCN started the exam in 2017 and kept improving on the processes.

In the fight against malpractice in the conduct of the exercise, she said TRCN had established a process of accreditation through a platform that the ICT department had developed.

She added that the platform could detect the actual people who registered for the examination to avoid impersonation of candidates.

“We started PQE in October 2017, and since then, we’ve been having it; we’ve been having two batches except in 2018/ 2019, where we have three batches.

“We have the May/June Diet and the October/ November Diet, and this is the second for this year.”

Commenting on the importance of the examination, Ms Ogboso said teaching was a profession and hence must be regularly used for effective results.

She said teachers had three opportunities to write the examination to get a licence to teach in the country and other parts of the world.

She said the FCT had the highest application, followed by Lagos and Anambra, while Ondo and Kaduna had equal numbers of registered teachers.

“We no longer depend on academic qualification.

“After their academic qualification, we are sure that the people who are going into the classroom to teach our children are actually professionally qualified, so this exam is important.

“If you do not pass this exam, you will not be registered by TRCN, and once you are not registered and identified as a teacher by TRCN, you will not be registered as a teacher in Nigeria and anywhere in the world.”

She added that most Nigerian teachers were aware of the importance of the certification and hence rushed to write the examination to get licensed and to operate as professional teachers.

She, therefore, promised that the results of the examinations, which started on Thursday, would be ready within two weeks.

(NAN)