The National Commission for Colleges of Education (NCCE) says it will begin the clamp down on some existing illegal Colleges of Education (COE) across the country.
Prof. Paulinus Okwelle, the Executive Secretary of the commission said this at a news conference to herald its National Summit with the theme ” Nigeria Certificate in Education: The Way Forward” in Abuja.
Okwelle said that the dwindling students’ enrollment was a major concern vis-a-vis low carrying capacity of the colleges in spite of adequate human and material resources.
He said that many factors responsible for the negative posture of the colleges needed proper and speedy attention.
“In the course of carrying out our regulatory and monitoring functions, we encounter challenges of the proliferation of illegal colleges of education and study centres around the country.
“This problem was discussed at the last meeting of the National Council on Education in Jalingo sequel to which we embarked on a special verification exercise.
“This exercise is to identify and close down the existing illegal colleges and NCE study centres in the country.
“At the end of the exercise, we discovered the existence of some illegal institutions and study centres spread across the country.
“The reports have been harmonised and will soon be forwarded to the Minister of Education for consideration and further directive,” he said.
The executive secretary said that the commission was not resting on its oars with respect to regulating functions over Nigeria Certificate in Education (NCE) programmes and awarding institutions.
He said there was constant need to ensure the revamping of the NCE programme for quality education.
“In order to reinvigorate our mandate, we have decided to stage a national conference to brainstorm on the future of the NCE.’’
He said that the conference would assess how far NCE had contributed to the development of education generally in the country.
Okwelle further commended past executive secretaries of the commission for their roles in carrying out the mandate of the commission since inception in 1989.
He said that the commission had recorded milestone achievements among which were upgrade of quality through accreditation, resource visitation, monitoring and programmes inspection.
Currently, there are 219 recognised NCE awarding institutions in Nigeria. They include 27 Federal, 50 States, 122 Private, 9 Polytechnics, and 11 of those affiliate institutions that run the NCE as a course of study under them.
“Periodically, we have been keeping close monitoring on the aforesaid institutions as a device to entrench standard and control or even upgrade the quality through accreditation.
“A total of 22 Colleges of Education have been accredited. Many other colleges have been scheduled for the exercise before the end of this year.
“We are in the process of reviewing our accreditation instrument to meet global trends, especially with the demand of the digital society,” he said.
Okwelle said that the commission would continue to encourage colleges of education to clear backlogs of unissued NCE certificates as 63,554 NCE certificates had been sealed for onward delivery to final year students. (NAN)
