Nigeria needs 1,320,135 teachers to meet the demands of? basic education by 2015, the Executive Secretary of National Commission for Colleges of Education (NCCE), Prof. Mohammed Ibn Junaid, has said.
He asserted that the nation needs to produce a total 330,033 teachers annually in order to achieve the Education For All (EFA) goal by 2015.
Junaid gave these figures yesterday at the 35th convocation lecture of the Federal College of Education (Technical), Akoka, Lagos.
He lamented that at the rate of the colleges’ current production capacity of 64,000 teachers per annum, it would take the country 20 years to produce the required number of teachers.
“If we are to achieve the Education For All (EFA) by 2015,” he said, “we would need to raise the current production level of the colleges of education to 330,033 teachers per annum for the next four years.”
The NCCE secretary stressed that the education roadmap indicators posed a great challenge to early childhood, basic, nomadic and junior secondary education sectors in the country and pointed out that the commission was presently battling to produce quality teachers to meet the growing number of school children in the nation’s schools as well as produce the right quality teachers for the various segments of the education systems.