TRCN, Registration and the Law That Makes It Mandatory

Teaching is a public trust with no market mechanism that can police it on its own: a parent cannot inspect a teacher's competence the way they can inspect a shoe, and a school owner chasing cheap staffing has an interest in NOT inspecting it. That is the case for a regulator, and the Teachers Registration Council of Nigeria exists to answer it. The Council was created by legislation in 1992 and its mandate, as restated in the Act now in force, is to register and licence teachers, to set the minimum standards for teacher education, and to discipline those who breach the professional rules. Registration is not a badge a teacher may choose to acquire: teaching without it is the thing the Act is written to prevent. The three verbs are worth separating, because examination questions turn on them. REGISTRATION puts a name on the register and recognises that the person meets the standard. LICENSING is the permission to practise that follows it — a licence can be suspended or withdrawn, which is what makes the discipline real. ACCREDITATION of training institutions is the third function, exercised with the bodies that supervise the institution concerned, and it is how the Council reaches backwards into the quality of NCE and B.Ed programmes rather than only judging graduates at the end. Entry to the register runs through the Professional Qualifying Examination. The PQE is a computer-based test of sixty questions in sixty minutes, sat by holders of the Nigeria Certificate in Education, by education-degree graduates and by degree holders who have completed a postgraduate diploma in education; the pass standard is fifty per cent, and the Council has run it in May and November diets. Categories of candidate (doctorate, master's, degree-plus-PGDE and NCE) are charged and scheduled differently, so the fee on the notice for a given diet is the only figure to trust; the structure the examination tests is the same for all of them. Two ideas explain most of what the professional-conduct questions are really asking. First, the Council's loyalty is to the learner and the public, not to the teacher's employer or union — where a school's instruction conflicts with the professional rule, the rule wins and the teacher is expected to say so. Second, a register only protects the public if names come OFF it, so failure to report misconduct, falsifying records and examination malpractice are treated as registration matters and not merely as employment matters.