Education

Liverpool teacher shortlisted for $1m global teacher prize

A UK PE teacher who has pioneered new ways of teaching sports to visually impaired children at a special needs school in Liverpool has been shortlisted for this year’s prestigious global teacher prize.

David Swanston, a teacher at St Vincent’s school, is in the final 10 out of 8,000 nominations and applications for this year’s $1m (£730,000) award, which is intended to showcase the work teachers do preparing young people for their future. It is funded by the Varkey Foundation and endorsed by Unesco.

He is joined by Elliott Lancaster, a 24-year-old postgraduate student at Keele University, who is shortlisted for the first Chegg.org global student prize, a sister award that rewards exceptional achievements in learning and extracurricular activity, with a $100,000 prize.

Swanston has taught children with visual impairments for more than a decade at St Vincent’s, which is a specialist school for children with sensory impairments. In 2020 he was appointed deputy principal.

Swanston specialises in PE but teaches a range of subjects including geography and art. He pioneered techniques to enable students with visual impairments to participate in sports, since they on average accumulate less than half the recommended 60 minutes of moderate daily activity. Several of his students have gone on to become Paralympians.

His work has included modelling techniques and examples to enable blind students to understand how sports pitches are laid out. He is developing a version of rugby specifically for blind children, which uses textures and electronics to model game play and create ball prototypes.

If he wins the global teacher prize, Swanston plans to use the funds to support physical activity, horticulture and wellbeing programmes at the neighbouring Alder Hey children’s hospital, as well as to develop inclusive and blind ice hockey across the UK. He will also use the funds to support his charity, Sightbox, which aims to improve access to adapted sport for visually impaired students in developing countries.

Lancaster is a postgraduate student at Keele University and a sustainability campaigner. In 2016 he established a social enterprise app in Newcastle-under-Lyme called Utter Rubbish, which updates local residents on recycling policies in their local area. There are now plans to roll out the service in other local councils. He has also set up a network of sustainability volunteers, who lobby for organisations to become carbon neutral.

In his academic work, Elliott has published two award-winning studies looking at interdisciplinary learning and the impact of coronavirus on blended learning.

Sunny Varkey, the founder of the Varkey Foundation, said Swanston and Lancaster’s nominations “highlight the importance of education in tackling the great challenges ahead – from climate change to growing inequality to global pandemics”.

The education secretary, Nadhim Zahawi, congratulated Swanston and Lancaster on their nominations. He said that after a recent meeting with Lancaster he had been “so impressed by his passion and commitment to issues like sustainability”, and he praised Swanston for his “innovation” and “inspirational work”.

The winners of both prizes will be announced on 10 November in a virtual ceremony hosted at Unesco’s headquarters in Paris.

Education

JAMB to release UTME resit results Wednesday

The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board has announced that it will on Wednesday release the results of 379,000 candidates who sat the rescheduled Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) between Friday and Monday.

JAMB rescheduled the exam following widespread outcry over mass failure during the initial UTME.

The board admitted to technical and human errors, especially in Lagos and South-East states, which significantly affected candidates’ performance.

Out of the 1.9 million candidates who sat this year’s UTME, over 1.5 million scored below 200 marks out of a possible 400, prompting widespread concern among stakeholders.

Following sustained pressure, JAMB investigated the mass failure and discovered technical and human errors in its system.

JAMB Registrar, Prof. Ishaq Oloyede, last week publicly accepted responsibility for the errors, even shedding tears while announcing a resit for the affected candidates.

Speaking to The PUNCH on Monday, JAMB’s spokesperson, Dr Fabian Benjamin, confirmed that the results of the rescheduled exams would be released on Wednesday.

‘The results of the candidates who took the rescheduled exam will be released on Wednesday’, Benjamin said.

Oloyede had earlier disclosed that 379,997 candidates in Lagos and the five states of the South-East were impacted by the UTME glitches.

According to him, 206,610 candidates in 65 centres across Lagos and 173,387 in 92 centres in the South-East zone were affected.

Describing the situation as ‘sabotage’, Oloyede said the affected candidates would start receiving text notifications for the rescheduled exam starting last Thursday.

Of the 1,955,069 results processed from the original UTME, only 4,756 candidates (0.24 per cent) scored 320 and above. An additional 7,658 candidates (0.39 per cent) scored between 300 and 319, bringing the total number of top-tier scorers (300 and above) to 12,414 (0.63 per cent).

Meanwhile, 73,441 candidates (3.76 per cent) scored between 250 and 299, while 334,560 (17.11 per cent) scored between 200 and 249.

A total of 983,187 candidates (50.29 per cent) scored between 160 and 199, widely considered the minimum threshold for admission in many institutions. Another 488,197 (24.97 per cent) scored between 140 and 159, 57,419 (2.94 per cent) between 120 and 139, 3,820 (0.20 per cent) between 100 and 119, and 2,031 (0.10 per cent) scored below 100.

Over 75 per cent of all candidates scored below 200 in the exam graded over 400 marks, fueling national debate over the credibility and fairness of the testing process.

Education

ASUU threatens to sue JAMB over UTME mass failure

The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), University of Nigeria Nsukka (UNN) branch, has threatened to sue the Joint Admission Matriculation Board (JAMB) over massive failure recorded in the 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Exam (UTME).

The Chairman of ASUU-UNN, Comrade Óyibo Eze, made the disclosure while briefing newsmen in Nsukka on Wednesday.

Oyibo said the massive failure which mostly affected candidates from the South East, was a deliberate attempt by JAMB to stop children from the zone from getting admission.

“My office has been inundated with protests, calls and visits by parents and the general public on this deliberate massive failure in 2025 JAMB examination.

“ASUU will challenge this result in High Court if JAMB fails to review the result and give candidates their merited scores.

“JAMB knows that children from South East must score higher before they can get admission whereas their counterparts in some parts of the country will use 120 JAMB score to get admission to read medicine in universities in their area.

“In the JAMB recently released result, out of 1,955,069 candidates who sat for the 2025 examination, over 1.5 million candidates scored less than 200 and majority of these are from the South East and Lagos State where many Igbo reside,” he said.

He called on governors from the South East to rise up and challenge this injustice targeted towards preventing children from the zone from gaining admission into higher institutions in the country.

“The governors in the zone should not sit and watch JAMB toy with academic future of our children.

” I am not against the board punishing those found guilty of exam malpractice but JAMB should not, because of these few candidates, fail the whole candidates in an exam centre,” he said.

The ASUU boss said that it was unbelievable and unacceptable that in the whole University Secondary School, Nsukka, no candidate that sat for the exam scored up to 200 in the UTME.

“This school has superlative students who have excelled in academics both inside and outside the school. How come all of them scored less than 200 in the exam?

“Even if JAMB discovered one or two candidates for exam malpractice, is that enough reason to fail all others who have prepared very hard for that exam,” he said.

Oyibo advised JAMB to act fast to do the needful by reviewing the result as that massive failure had become a national issue which might attract national protest if nothing urgent was done.

Education

JAMB orders review of 2025 UTME

The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has ordered an immediate review of the 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) following a wave of public complaints alleging technical glitches, incomplete questions, and unusually low scores even as thousands of candidates have threatened to sue the examination body.

The Board, in a statement issued by its Public Communication Advisor, Fabian Benjamin, acknowledged what it described as an “unusual volume of complaints” since the release of the UTME results last Friday.

It said the development had prompted it to fast-track its annual post-examination review process, which typically takes place months after the exercise.

“We are particularly concerned about the unusual complaints originating from a few states within the federation,” Fabian said. “We are currently scrutinising these complaints in detail to identify and rectify any potential technical issues.”.

The spokesperson explained that the annual review covers three stages of the UTME cycle—registration, examination, and result release.

He added that if any faults are found in the system, JAMB would not hesitate to implement “appropriate remedial measures.

“To assist in this process, we have engaged a number of experts, including members from the Computer Professionals Association of Nigeria, Chief External Examiners, who are heads of tertiary institutions, the Educational Assessment and Research Network in Africa, measurement experts, and Vice Chancellors from various institutions.”

The exam board noted that “If it is determined that there were indeed glitches, we will implement appropriate remedial measures promptly, as we do in the case of the examinations themselves.”

JAMB’s intervention comes amid reports that thousands of candidates are preparing to file a class-action lawsuit against the Board over the alleged irregularities.

Many claim they encountered technical malfunctions and inconsistent question displays during the examination.

The controversy reached a boiling point after JAMB revealed in its viral statistical data that over 1.5 million out of the 1.9 million candidates who sat for this year’s UTME scored below 200 out of a possible 400 marks