The Lagos State Government has said that it would carry out an assessment of teachers in public primary and secondary schools to ascertain their skills and competence.
The state’s Commissioner for Education, Olayinka Oladunjoye, who spoke on the move in Ikeja at a sensitisation programme on the exercise, said the assessment would be conducted within the state Teachers’ Competency Framework and the objective was to ensure teachers had the right competencies for optimum performance.
“We are carrying out a competency assessment of our teachers to ascertain their skills and competencies and to see if such matches their job responsibilities.
“You see, the skills required to teach in a primary school are not the same skills required to teach in a secondary school; so we want our teachers to have the right skills, especially ICT skills. We want to ensure that the right people have the right responsibilities,” she said.
Oladunjoye said the exercise was not to weed out any teacher from the system as those found to be deficient would be properly trained.
The commissioner explained that the planned competency assessment was a major component of the Teachers` Competency Framework, designed to enhance professionalism of teachers.
She said that the ultimate objective of the exercise was to impact on productivity and improve student’s performance.
In his brief remarks at the occasion, Gov. Babatunde Fashola said quality education was a misnomer without teachers with right skills and competency levels.
He said the state government had consistently demonstrated its commitment to the training and retraining of teachers.
Fashola said the state government had done a lot in the area of improving learning and teaching infrastructure and was presently devoting more attention to building the capacities of teachers.
“We are doing a lot to fix the schools, the classrooms, the staff rooms and make the learning environment more conducive; work has not finished but things are improving.
“But beautiful schools and classrooms do not teach, it is the teachers with the right professionalism and competence that teach. In recognition of this fact, we have committed a lot to the training and retraining of teachers and we are doing more. In fact, if anybody wants to help us now, we will tell them to help in training our teachers,” he said.
Fashola, urged teachers to make professionalism their watchword as it was the only thing that would ensure they impacted positively on their pupils.
He said the government was putting a structure in place that would adequately reward teachers with improved competencies and those who demonstrated professionalism on the job.
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