According to Adamu Adamu, Minister of Education, the federal government has granted a stipend of N75,000 per semester for students pursuing degree programs in education at public universities across the country.
He also stated that Nigeria Certificate in Education students will be paid N50,000 per semester as a stipend.
This, he claims, is to attract the brightest minds to the teaching profession and to encourage the top graduates to choose teaching jobs.
On Tuesday, he spoke in Abuja at a ceremony commemorating World Teachers’ Day 2021, with the subject “Teachers at the Heart of Education Recovery.”
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The minister, who was represented by his permanent secretary, Sonny Echono, stated that his ministry would work with state governments to ensure that students are automatically employed upon graduation.
“B.Ed/B.A. Ed/BSc. Ed students in public universities will receive stipends of N75,000.00 every semester, while NCE students would receive stipends of N50,000.00 per semester.
“The Federal Government should develop a way for individual state governments to automatically employ NCE graduates at the Basic Education level,” he stated.
The National Teacher Education Policy and other policies on teaching careers should be reviewed by the Teachers Registration Council of Nigeria; the Ministerial Strategic Plan and previous policies on teacher retention should be reviewed by NCCE; and the phrase “first-class graduates” should be replaced with “high flyers.”
Most of the milestones in the repositioning of teachers, according to President Muhammadu Buhari, would be met by January 2022.
He also promised that impacted teachers’ unpaid salary will be paid by December 2021.
Buhari, who was represented by Minister of State for Education Emeka Nwajiuba, said the Ministry of Education has started a pilot program to raise the retirement age for teachers and education officers to 65 or 40 years of service.
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Nasir Idris, President of the Nigerian Union of Teachers, stated that teachers must be properly equipped, empowered, and supported in order to be effective in carrying out the work of education recovery.
He asked the federal and state governments, as well as private citizens, to work together to restore peace, order, and peaceful coexistence in schools and school communities for the country’s benefit.
Idris urged “erring” state governments to immediately adopt the National Minimum Wage.
He said that in some states, primary school teachers’ salaries were not being paid on time.
He requested the federal government to generously approve the payment of the 27.5 percent professional allowance to Federal Government Colleges teachers.
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