New registration template for UTME will make provision for IEIs

The Minister for Education Prof. Ruqquayatu Rufai has approved that effective 2014, JAMB will list Innovation Institutions independent of others on JAMB registration template. Hence, candidates will have to choose eight schools.

 For the first time, TVET is now in the front burner of the education sector.

 In addition to that, this 2013/2014 academic session, other tertiary institutions have planned to admit about 500,000 candidates, be sure that we innovative institutions will supplement that by additional 103,000 candidates.

 Prior to this time, we were lumped up with polytechnics and they nearly choked us and denied us of our identity. Operational guidelines of universities are different from those of polytechnics, operational guidelines of polytechnics are also different from those of the colleges of education.

 In the same way, the operational guidelines of innovation enterprise institutions are different from those of other institutions.

 That was what we drew the attention of the Federal Government to. What this means is that henceforth, candidates will choose two universities, two polytechnics, two colleges of education and two innovative institutions.

 Another advantage is that we are going to have a lot of candidates to contend with.

 Before now, people were not aware that there were spaces in innovative institutions.

 Instead of advertising from one place to the other, we pushed to get the policy right; and thankfully, we have done that.

 And by 2014, we plan to increase intake to 110,000 candidates by year 2015, and year 2016 intake into Innovative institutions should be 140,000 by 2015 until we reach 200,000 by year 2017.