The Executive Secretary of National Senior Secondary Education Commission NSSEC, Dr. Iyela Ajayi, has spoken on how senior secondary education became an orphan and was completely neglected with serious implications for that sub-sector. According to him, his commission, after it was created, has prepared a document on minimum standards for secondary schools education, formulated the National Policy on Senior Secondary Education and implementation guidelines to arrest the decays in the sub-sector, Frank Ikpefan reports.
The mandate of NSEC and why it was NSSEC established
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).
Now, from that time onwards, UBEC became the regulatory agency for basic and junior secondary education and also became the intervention agency for basic education. And of course, the implication of that was that senior secondary education was left in the cold without a regulatory agency and intervention agency. I’m sure if you can cast your mind back, tertiary education had regulatory agencies and intervention agency.
Now, senior secondary education became the only sub-sector of the Nigerian education system without a regulatory agency and an intervention agency, and that has serious implication. What it meant was that senior secondary education became what one might describe as an orphan, and it was completely neglected. Nobody cared for senior secondary education, and that has serious implication for that sub-sector.
In the sense that without a regulatory agency, without an intervention agency, what you now had was a situation whereby you had decayed infrastructure, inadequate facilities, teachers’ problem in terms of quantity, quality, low achievement rate of students, the problem of social vices became worsening, and so on and so forth.
It was in an attempt to arrest the decay in that sub-sector of Nigerian educational system that NSEC was created.
Senior secondary education, of course, is the bridge between basic education and tertiary education. That bridge must be strengthened. If you destroy that bridge, it will have serious implication for the future of education in this country.
Now, when government realised the decay going on in that sub-sector, and when government also realised the importance of the sub-sector, it intervened by establishing the NSSEC to serve as the regulatory agency for senior secondary education and, of course, the intervention agency.
Before my arrival in this commission, it was only senior secondary education that did not have minimum standards. So, what it means is that things were just going on, no regulation. Now, the number one mandate, of course, is to prescribe and enforce. We are not only giving the power to prescribe, we are also giving the power to enforce it.
Now, again, we are supposed to formulate policies for senior secondary education in this country, of course, with the approval of the government. That we are doing.
Then, this commission is also charged with the responsibility of organising capacity-building for teachers of senior secondary schools. Not only teachers, but non-teachers at the same time. The commission also has the mandate of collection of data; data on senior secondary education in this country.
This commission also has the mandate of promoting inclusive education. We are talking about the people with special needs, the girl-child, and so on and so forth; so many of them. I think about 20 or 21.
We are expected to function the same way as UBEC. You know, the Act establishing UBEC has committed the government to giving UBEC 2% of the Consolidated Revenue Fund. By the Act establishing this commission, we are also expected to receive 2% of the Consolidated Revenue Fund.
Part of this money is supposed to go to the states to carry out infrastructural development, to provide facilities in their own schools. And they are going to pay just a minimal counterpart fund of 5%, and not 50% like UBEC.
Achievements of NSSEC mandates
Honestly, we have gone very far. Within one year of my appointment, we have done marvelously. Well, I don’t want to judge myself, but I think I will leave that to you, our watchdog. We have prepared a document on minimum standards. That document actually was validated by all the stakeholders, commissioners of education, NGOs, development partners.
I think that was in the month of February this year or so. The honourable ministers, the permanent secretary and the commissioners were there. That document was validated by them.
And you know, when you want to produce a policy document, it has to go through different stages. From there, the document was taken to the JCCE that is the Joint Consultative Committee on Education. That committee approved it.
The last bus stop was at the National Council on Education. You know quite alright that the National Council on Education is the highest policy-making body as far as education is concerned in this country. The National Council on Education at its meeting in September approved that document on the minimum standards.
In the minimum standards, you have prescription on the number of teachers every school should have, what should be the teacher-student ratio. You know, of course, in the National Policy on Education, it is 1 to 40 for senior secondary schools.
The minimum standards have reached the point of final production. It has been approved by the highest policy-making body on education in this country, the National Council on Education. Allow me to inform you that we have produced a document called the National Policy on Senior Secondary Education. That is the first of its kind in this country. We have not only produced that document, we have the implementation guidelines. The documents are there, in fact, published already.
And that one also was not just produced in one day. The production, of course, it went through different stages. There was the by virtual meeting, stakeholders were there, they looked at it, because that is what the Acts says. They made their comments, observations. These observations were taken into consideration, were corrected.
From there, the document was taken to the JCCE, that is the Joint Consultative Committee on Education, where that document again was approved. From there, it was taken to the National Council on Education, where it was again approved.
That one has been published and has been circulated among all the states of this country and some of the states have even started implementing the content of that document. I was actually going towards the direction of private schools and you talked about them not being able to employ qualified teachers.
I want to correct something. When I said private schools, it is not all of them; there are some that are even of higher standards than even the public schools but majority of them they have question marks.
These big schools sometimes charge exorbitant fees that are not commensurate with what they pay their teachers. And you know when you don’t treat your teachers well, they won’t deliver well and this will have implications on the students. I don’t know if you are looking at how to control this.
The new Minister of Education, Dr. Tunji Alausa, is interested in staff welfare. He’s interested in two things; capacity building of teachers, and also the motivation of teachers. He has personally said it in the open, and I want to assure you that as far as this commission is concerned, part of our focus from next year is to see that teachers in our senior secondary schools are motivated in one way or the other.
Now, how about the private schools? This is an issue which, of course, we are going to write a memo on, because the honourable minister of education is passionate about teachers.
Because, you know, he’s somebody who believes that, yes, you can have the best facilities, you can have structures, but if your teachers are not good, if your teachers are not well-trained, teachers who are supposed to be curriculum implementers, if they’re not well-trained, then, of course, your curriculum and infrastructure are just useless.
So, the present minister of education is passionate about capacity building of teachers and staff welfare. And he has told us to key into it, and that is exactly what we intend to do from next year.
On areas of intervention
Yes, at the beginning of this interview, I informed you that this commission is to operate the same way as UBEC. It is to be given 2% of the Consolidated Revenue Fund and you know that is a lot of money for intervention because that money is supposed to be used for intervention. But the truth of the matter is that we have not received a kobo.
But of course this year, something happened and the National Assembly of course, they rightly observed that amongst all the educational agencies, it is only this commission that is not receiving reasonable funding from the government for intervention.
So they said we are going to put you in the budget so that you will be able to intervene in about 50 senior secondary schools in this country.
And in those schools, we are going to upgrade the facilities, provide lecture halls, laboratories, e-Libraries, and admin blocks and so on and so forth.
Intervention in 50 secondary schools
In many areas, provision of classrooms, provision of laboratories because if you visit many of these schools, many of them don’t even have laboratories and they offer science subjects.
Even those that have so called laboratories, they have what they called multi-purpose lab, in other words, you have only one room, it is for physics, chemistry, biology, home economics, everything in that room. And some of them are looking like where chickens are reared. I said no.
So, we are going to provide well equipped e-Library, administrative blocks in 50 senior secondary schools.
Issue of curriculum for senior secondary schools
It is very important. If you want to find out the level of development of a country, look at the curriculum. So the curriculum is very important. If you go to these countries that have developed a lot in Asia, I am talking of Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong and one other country, I think Taiwan or so, these countries have laid emphasis on technical, vocational education and training and of course on entrepreneurship education.
But you find a situation whereby our own curriculum has serious defects because people argue that it is not relevant to the needs of this country, to the expectations of the country. And that problem is being addressed by the new curriculum on senior secondary education that will be out next year.
Now, I am sure you know that the Nigerian Educational Research Development Council (NERDC) has the major responsibility of developing curriculum.
By the Act establishing us, we have been asked to collaborate with them; you know if you take away curriculum from them, that agency may not have any work to do again. So we have been asked to collaborate with them, which we are doing.
In fact, the new, the proposed senior secondary education curriculum was presented during a stakeholders meeting this year, to validate that document. We were invited and we also made our own presentation to that meeting. So by the grace of God, the new curriculum for senior secondary education will be out any time next year.
The implications of defective curriculum on students
The truth is that many of our schools are still comfortable with the traditional method of teaching. Many of them don’t know how to operate a computer and that is so bad. Next year, we want to begin to correct that by ensuring that teachers are exposed to digital learning training and it will be compulsory.
We are going to make a recommendation to the minister that this training should not only be compulsory, that there should be certificate given to them and the certificate given to them should be part of the documents they should produce for their promotion.
When you do that, I can assure you that in the next five years, from our own estimate, at least half of our teachers in senior secondary schools will have acquired that training in digital literacy, artificial intelligence, robotics and so on and so forth.
We are also planning next year to revive the programme of school farms.
