Nigeria Just Made It Easier to Become a Teacher, But Will It Change Anything in Schools?
Editor’s note: Nigeria has opened a new pathway into teacher training by removing a key exam requirement, a move meant to ease pressure on admissions. But with classrooms already stretched and teachers leaving the system, questions are raised about what this really changes. Femi Aderibigbe, a development practitioner and scholar, dissects what may be missing beneath the new policy.
In every state where education advocacy has taken me across northern Nigeria, the story from teachers is consistent. They did not leave the classroom because the entrance examination was too hard. They left because the salary did not arrive. After all, the classroom held 80 pupils, because the profession that promised them dignity delivered exhaustion and institutional indifference instead. The teacher shortage that Nigeria's Ministry of Education is attempting to solve is real. The solution announced on May 11, 2026, misreads its cause so fundamentally that it cannot produce the outcome it is designed to achieve.
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The Federal Government's decision to exempt Nigeria Certificate in Education candidates and National Diploma applicants in non-technology agriculture from the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) is a policy built on a correct diagnosis and an incorrect remedy. The teacher deficit is genuine. The UTME was never what was causing it.
What was decided
At the 2026 Policy Meeting on Admissions to Tertiary Institutions in Abuja, Minister of Education Tunji Alausa announced that candidates seeking admission into NCE programmes would no longer be required to sit the UTME, provided they possess a minimum of four O-level credit passes. The exemption simultaneously covers National Diploma candidates in non-technology agriculture and agriculture-related courses in polytechnics. All applicants must still register with JAMB and be processed through the Central Admissions Processing System for credential verification before admission letters are issued.
The decision is framed as aimed at reducing the administrative burden on JAMB, which this year processed over 2.2 million candidates for the 2026 UTME, a 10.5% increase from the 2.03 million who sat in 2025.
The same meeting retained 150 out of 400 as the minimum university cut-off mark, equating to 37.5%, and 100 out of 400 for polytechnics, equating to 25%. Both figures have generated public anger. But the UTME exemption deserves more sustained scrutiny, because its consequences are more structurally significant and far less visible in the current noise.
The misdiagnosis
Nigeria is currently facing a deficit of nearly 200,000 teachers at the basic education level, a gap that continues to widen due to declining enrolment in teacher training institutions. Several states have gone up to five years without recruiting a single teacher.
That last detail is the accountability sentence this policy has not engaged. If states are not recruiting, the constraint is at the hiring and deployment end of the pipeline, not the training entry end. Removing the UTME requirement does not compel a single state government to open a recruitment round. It produces more NCE certificate holders waiting for jobs that states are not creating.
With education receiving around 6-7% of the national budget, far below international recommendations, the resources required to support teachers and schools remain insufficient. Nigerian teachers face a crisis of being both overworked and underpaid. Many must teach multiple subjects outside their area of specialisation due to staff shortages. In rural communities, teachers may work in classrooms without adequate furniture, electricity, or internet connectivity.
These are the barriers keeping qualified people out of teaching. Not the UTME.
The National Personnel Audit of Teachers revealed that over 40% of teachers in public primary schools across Nigeria do not possess the minimum NCE qualification. A large number have not received any formal in-service training or professional development in the past decade.
Nigeria does not have a surplus of NCE certificates, straining against an admission barrier. It has a profession so poorly resourced and professionally undervalued that the certificates already in circulation have not translated into a functioning teacher corps. More certificates, produced through a lower-threshold pathway, do not change that arithmetic.
Entrance exams for Colleges of Education in Nigeria are structured to send the lowest-performing candidates to these colleges, while the top performers are admitted to universities. This creates a perception that bright students are not meant to become teachers, deterring them from pursuing a career in teaching.
The policy does nothing to alter this perception. It deepens it.
Six technical failures in one policy
First, the UTME was not the operative barrier for NCE candidates. Colleges of Education already set significantly lower cut-offs than universities, often in the 140 to 160 range under the previous system. The candidates most likely to be reached by this exemption were already accessing NCE programmes. The exemption widens an entry point that was already accessible to most motivated candidates.
Second, CAPS verification is administrative, not academic. The minister presented JAMB's credential screening system as the quality safeguard replacing the UTME. It is not. CAPS verifies that O-level results are genuine and that placement procedures are followed. It does not assess subject knowledge depth, cognitive preparedness for tertiary study, or any measure of pedagogical aptitude. The conflation of administrative processing with academic screening is a category error embedded in the policy's own justification.
Third, O-level results are not a sufficiently robust standalone measure. Nigeria's secondary school examination system carries documented integrity challenges, including school-level malpractice and results manipulation that any experienced practitioner in this space knows is widespread. Using O-level results as the sole academic metric for entry into teacher education, in an environment where those results vary enormously by school quality, geographic access, and examination centre integrity, does not strengthen the admission system. It relocates the vulnerability to a less visible point.
Fourth, the policy confuses the quantity of certificates with the quality of teaching. The UTME exemption makes it easier to become a teacher without making it more appealing to be one. The structural conditions that drive qualified people away from teaching, salary delays, overcrowded classrooms, and absent welfare packages are untouched. More NCE holders will be produced. Classrooms will not improve by that production alone.
Fifth, the agriculture exemption misidentifies the barrier to agricultural education enrolment. Young Nigerians avoid agricultural programmes because of profitability uncertainty, insecurity in farming communities, land tenure insecurity, and the persistent social perception that farming is a livelihood of last resort. None of these is addressed by removing the UTME. A candidate previously deterred from an agricultural ND was not deterred by the examination. They were deterred by the sector's prospects. That calculation has not changed.
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Sixth, no concurrent structural investment was announced alongside the exemption. Not a single naira of additional teacher salary was committed. Not a welfare fund. Not a rural posting incentive. Not a college infrastructure budget line. The exemption was announced as a standalone access measure. Without structural reform alongside it, access to an unchanged, underfunded, and professionally unattractive system is not a benefit to the candidates entering it.
What actually works
The countries that have resolved teacher shortages did not do so by reducing the entry standard for teacher training. They did so by making teaching a profession worth entering. Finland's teacher education programmes are oversubscribed and highly selective. Pay is competitive. Professional development is institutionalised. The lesson is direct: professional attractiveness, not examination barriers, drives teacher supply. Nigeria's policy inverts this lesson.
Effective education reform targets the diagnosis. Community barriers keeping girls out of school in northern Nigeria are not resolved by changing the UTME; they are resolved by addressing the actual barriers. The same logic applies here. The teacher shortage will not be resolved by making the NCE credential easier to obtain. It will be resolved when teaching becomes a profession that talented, prepared people want to enter and stay in. That requires salary reform, welfare investment, institutional respect, and consistent state-level recruitment. None of those was announced on May 11.
Gender and equity lens
Female teachers are the single most documented factor in girls' school retention in northern Nigerian communities, where cultural barriers to girls' education are strongest. A policy that dilutes the academic rigour of teacher certification without compensating through structural investment in teacher welfare and professional quality makes the female teacher most likely to serve those communities less well-prepared for that role. The girls she teaches are the ultimate bearers of that consequence.
In some northern and southeastern states, one teacher is responsible for up to six different subjects, including core areas like Mathematics, Physics, Biology, and Civic Education. Such practices stretch teacher capacity and compromise both subject matter depth and instructional quality. Adding more under-prepared teachers to an already overstretched system does not ease that burden. It distributes it more widely without reducing it.
Persons with disabilities seeking NCE entry through the new pathway face a specific concern: the shift from centralised UTME to institutional screening creates variable conditions across colleges whose accessibility provisions are inconsistently documented and enforced.
Rights-based framing
Section 18 of Nigeria's constitution obligates the government to direct its policy towards ensuring equal and adequate educational opportunities at all levels. The Universal Basic Education Act creates the legal framework for free, compulsory nine-year basic education. These commitments are not discharged by increasing the volume of NCE certificates in circulation. They are discharged when children in Nigeria's public schools have teachers who are academically prepared, professionally supported, and reliably present.
A child's right to education includes the right to a teacher who can teach. The policy, as designed, does not guarantee that.
Nigeria is also a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, whose Article 29 requires that education be directed to the development of each child's personality, talents, and mental and physical abilities to their fullest potential. That obligation is not met through a certification system that no longer requires the certificate holder to demonstrate cognitive preparedness for professional responsibility.
Calls to action
For citizens: Three questions require written answers from the Federal Ministry of Education before this exemption takes effect.
One: What specific competency assessment will Colleges of Education administer to NCE applicants who do not sit the UTME, who have designed it, and what is the minimum pass standard?
Two: What concurrent investment in teacher salary, welfare, and professional development has been committed in the 2026 education budget alongside this exemption?
Three: What mechanism will track, by cohort, the classroom performance and retention rates of NCE graduates who entered through the O-level-only pathway, so the policy's impact can be evaluated by evidence rather than assumption?
Submit these questions to the Ministry of Education's public contact channel in writing. Publish whatever response you receive.
For institutions: The National Commission for Colleges of Education must publish, within 60 days, a binding minimum institutional assessment framework for NCE applicants admitted without UTME scores. It must specify the cognitive and subject knowledge domains to be assessed, the minimum pass standard, and the accountability mechanism for colleges that admit below it. Without this framework, quality assurance has been delegated to institutions with uneven capacity and no published standard against which their conduct can be measured.
The National Assembly's Committee on Basic Education must convene a public hearing before the 2026/2027 admission cycle opens, at which the Ministry of Education presents the evidence base for the exemption and the concurrent structural investments that would make it educationally coherent. A hearing after implementation is documentation. A hearing is accountability.
The teacher shortage is real. The urgency is warranted. But a policy that widens the gateway into a profession while leaving the profession itself unchanged will produce more paper, and Nigeria's children need more than that from their government.
Femi Aderibigbe is a Pan-Africanist development practitioner and scholar with about 17 years of experience advancing social movements, managing high-impact partnerships, and driving policy reform across Africa. He works at the intersection of evidence, advocacy, and accountability to strengthen grassroots power and public systems.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Legit.ng.
Source: Legit.ng
