The Executive Secretary of the National Senior Secondary Education Commission (NSSEC), Dr Ajayi Iyela, speaks with CLEMENT IDOKO on the efforts of the commission to reposition and improve the quality of senior secondary education in Nigeria. Excerpts…
STAKEHOLDERS have observed that the senior secondary education curriculum is outdated and not relevant to the needs and expectations of Nigeria. What is your commission doing to address this challenge?
Curriculum is key. If you go to any school, there are three major areas that will prove to you if the school is up to standard or not. The calibres of teachers in the school should also be observed. Are they qualified and well-trained? You also consider the learning environment in terms of structures too. Are there laboratories and well-equipped libraries?? Then, of course, you have to look at the curriculum. If you want to know the level of development of a country, look at its academic curriculum. The curriculum is very germane to national development. In developed countries such as Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, among others, emphasis is laid more on technical, vocational, and entrepreneurship education. People have always argued that our curriculum has serious defects; they say it is not relevant to the needs of the country. However, this issue will be addressed by the new senior secondary curriculum that will be out this year. The curriculum will be addressing the challenge of skill gaps in Nigeria.
The NSSEC came as a child of necessity, what exactly is the commission under your watch doing to justify these claims to set minimum standards for secondary education in the country?
You will recall that in 2004, the government decided to de-articulate secondary education by removing the junior secondary component of it and merging it with the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC). Since then, UBEC became the regulatory body for basic and junior secondary education and the intervention agency for basic education. The implication was that senior secondary education was left in the cold without a regulatory or intervention agency. If you remember, tertiary education had regulatory and intervention agencies. For instance, universities have the National Universities Commission (NUC) as the regulatory agency, colleges of education have the National Commission for Colleges of Education (NCCE) and polytechnics also have the National Board for Technical Education (NBTE). Now, tertiary education also has an intervention agency, known as Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFUND).
The Senior Secondary Education is the only sub-sector of the Nigerian education system without a regulatory or intervention agency, and that has serious implication on the sector. What that connotes is that the senior secondary education has become what one may describe as an orphan; it has been completely neglected. Nobody cared for senior secondary education, and that doesn’t augur well for that sub-sector. The aftermath of such is decayed infrastructure; inadequate facilities, teaching problems in terms of quantity and quality, low performance rate of students; with the issue of social vices becoming worse among others..
The commission has been working tirelessly on the minimum standards expected of each school in terms of quality delivery, student-teacher ratio, qualifications of teachers, among others. We are deliberate on the number of teachers every school should have and what should be the teacher-student ratio. One of our mandates is to formulate policies on senior secondary education with the approval of the Federal Government, which we have done. Our National Policy on Senior Secondary Education is first of its kind in this country. According to it, the student-teacher ratio is 1 to 40 for senior secondary schools. We have not only produced that document, we also have the implementation guidelines.
In the area of data collection, our commission has the latest data on all aspects. We have organised capacity-building for teachers in the six geopolitical zones, but with a focus on English and Mathematics, because they are the core subjects.
Are the state governments collaborating effectively with your commission since they are the owners of most of these secondary schools, the private sector too?
We have visited state governors, particularly on this, because the law establishing the commission says for any state to benefit from our intervention, they must establish their boards. They must replicate this commission in their states, though these boards won’t be known as commissions. I’m glad that as a result of my visits to these states, many of them have now established their boards; the latest was Kogi State. Going by the last count, we know about 20 boards. Now, we have also embarked on what we call monitoring of learning achievements to know the extent to which our children are learning in the classrooms. We organised one recently for the SSS 1 and 2 students. We want to know their performance in English Language and Mathematics. For instance if the performance is low, we are bound to know why and ask questions such as is it that the teachers are not qualified or are the facilities not there? What about the teaching methods?
As we speak, the monitoring and evaluation of schools is ongoing. Also, we have introduced public lecture series, journal publications, and ranking of senior secondary schools across the country. If the National Universities Commission (NUC) can rank universities, what stops us from doing same for secondary schools? The ranking will be based on the benchmark in performance. In other words, when we go around the schools to enforce minimum standards, there will be scoring. If your score is very high, we will either give you A, B, and so on. This will afford the parents too, to have an idea of the standard of the school they are sending their child to and we all know the implication of such a decision.
What are the measures you have put in place to check the menace of proliferation of private secondary schools in Nigeria?
One basic truth is that we cannot do without private schools. As of today, we have about 50,000 secondary schools in this country. I want to tell you that about 70 to 80 percent of them are owned by the private sector. I have visited many of these private schools. Some of their proprietors have even been saying, ‘ES, it seems you have been appointed to come and fight us’ and I said, ‘no.’ If private schools constitute up to 80 percent of the senior secondary schools in this country, it means that we must not only focus on the public schools, but also on the private schools, or else we will just be beating about the bush. We have discovered that some of them have ramshackle buildings and many of their teachers are not qualified. We are all aware of all these things. They pay a graduate teacher a sum of N10,000, there is no motivation whatsoever. Let us not deceive ourselves; many of these private schools are centres of examination malpractices. I’ve told them that we are coming for them.
I know some people will say ES, how will you cope with 50,000 schools? For instance, it is easy for the NUC, to go round all the universities because the total number is 300 as well as for NBTE to visit all the polytechnics because they are just about 180. The truth is, we have our plans to reach them all even if schools are located in the creeks. If your school is located in a remote area of this country, I can assure you that we will get there. When the time comes, we are going to write officially to the government on what to do with those schools.
Against the backdrop that a lot of these private schools charge high fees but pay their teachers pittance as salaries, does your commission have any plan to address the challenge of poor remuneration of teachers in private schools?
The Minister of Education, Dr Tunji Alausa, is interested in the welfare, capacity building, and motivation of teachers. He has said that in the open, and I want to assure you that as far as this commission is concerned, part of our focus is to see that teachers in our senior secondary schools across the nation are motivated in one way or the other. On the private schools teachers, we are going to write a memo to the minister of education on this. We will definitely address the issue of remuneration in private schools.
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