TheCable

The Latter Rain Assembly has disclosed its plan to train public school teachers in Lagos.

Olabode Adekanye, director of learning and development at Latter Rain Assembly, made this known while speaking with TheCable at the church’s maiden education summit on Saturday.

Adekanye said the church wants to address the rot in the educational system.

“It was put together to kickstart a process whereby the rot in the educational system can be addressed appropriately,” he said referring to the training.

“Virtually everybody knows what is wrong with our system but nobody is taking any deliberate step to address the rot in the system. We know we can’t cover the entire country at a time but we are starting the process where we are situated.

“We will start with the public school teachers in Lagos, a lot of private schools employ teachers based on the skills they have acquired, experience and exposure but it doesn’t happen in so many public schools so it’s like there is a space to be filled, let’s fill it up.”

According to Adekanye, the areas to be addressed are capacity building, advocacy, policy formulation, girl child education and curriculum development.

“There are six educational districts in Lagos and we want to impact the districts as much as we can and this includes training their teachers,” he said.

“Our concern, just as it concerns Pastor Tunde Bakare, is to have a Nigeria that works in our lifetime, have an educational system that works in our lifetime so that some years down the line, we can say thank God some people took steps in addressing some of these problems.

“We are going to work with the educational districts, who will give out invitations to teachers in their district, and so we can train them. We are trying to do it in a new way, look at examples within the environment that can be used as case study so that they can relate to them and then we address the problem.”

Jacob Adeyanju, a lecturer at the department of educational management, University of Lagos, who delivered a lecture at the summit, said the teaching profession is stressful.

“Before we used to have the notion that teaching is not stressful but research has shown that there is stress in teaching because we are losing vibrant, young and promising professionals to death as a result of stress,” he said.