The Teacher Schools Call First
In every Nigerian city there is a small group of teachers who never look for work. Schools call them. Parents ask for them by name at registration. When they resign, a counter-offer appears within a day. Look at their certificates and you find nothing that explains it — there are hundreds of teachers with the same degree and the same service year struggling to get an interview at all.
I have had an unusual vantage point on this, because I build the software schools use to make these decisions, and I get to see what information is actually in front of a proprietor at the moment they choose. What separates the called-first teacher is not a hidden talent. It is that they are legible. The school can see what they will get, and can say it out loud to somebody else.
Legibility beats quality, at the point of decision
This is an uncomfortable claim, so let me be precise about it. I am not saying the best teachers are not the ones being called. Often they are. I am saying that at the exact moment of decision, the school is not comparing teaching — it cannot observe teaching. It is comparing representations of teaching. Whoever is easiest to represent wins the comparison.
A proprietor deciding between two candidates has to justify the choice to a spouse, a board, or a parent who asks who is taking SS3 physics. The teacher who supplies a defensible sentence — a result, a cohort, an exam record, a named referee who answers the phone — hands over the justification ready-made. The other candidate may be the better teacher and still lose, because choosing them requires the proprietor to manufacture the argument themselves.
What the called-first teacher has done
Reconstructing from the ones I have watched, it is a short and unromantic list:
- They keep receipts. Class averages before and after. Exam cohorts and outcomes. A note of the students who moved the furthest. This costs a few minutes a term and it is the single largest differentiator in the entire market, because almost nobody does it.
- They are reachable. Number correct, answered during working hours, and a reply the same day. The number of opportunities lost to an unreachable phone is genuinely absurd, and it is invisible to the person losing them.
- They are known by someone other than themselves. A head teacher who will vouch, a colleague at another school, a parent who names them. Reputation in Nigerian education travels through people, not documents, and the called-first teacher has quietly given several people something specific to say.
- They are specific about what they teach and when. “Available Tuesdays and Thursdays, and after 1 p.m. daily; IGCSE and WAEC chemistry” gets booked. “Open to opportunities” gets scrolled past, because it transfers all the work of matching onto the reader.
- They leave schools well. The teacher who finishes the term, hands over their scheme of work with the cursor marked, and gives real notice becomes the person a proprietor recommends to another proprietor. The one who vanishes in October saves themselves two weeks and pays for it for years, in a market smaller and more talkative than they think.
The part that is genuinely unfair
All of this rewards documentation over teaching, and I do not want to dress that up as justice. A brilliant teacher who kept no records is not worse at the job than a mediocre one who did. But the hiring process cannot see into a classroom, and it will not learn to. It sees a file, a phone call and a reputation, and it decides from those.
So the honest advice is not be better. Most teachers I meet are already better than their outcomes suggest. The advice is: start producing the evidence that a school can act on, because the evidence is the only part of your work the market can actually read.
Where the responsibility lands
I should say the other half of this, since I build for both sides. A market where legibility beats quality is a market with a broken instrument, and that is a problem for schools to solve, not teachers. Structured records, verified histories and evidence that travels with a teacher between schools would let a proprietor see something closer to the truth. That is a large part of what I work on.
Until that instrument exists, though, the teacher who documents their results is not gaming anything. They are simply the only person supplying the data the decision requires. Schools call them first because they are the only ones who can be seen.