Unregistered low-cost private schools in Lagos State may not be under threat of being shut by the government. But, experts have warned that competition and 21st century demands for technology may drive them out of business, KOFOWOROLA BELO-OSAGIE reports.
Many low-cost private schools under the aegis of the Association for Formidable Educational Development (AFED) in Lagos have survived repeated campaigns by the government to shut them down. Because many run foul of the registration criteria that require that they be situated on four plots of land owned by the school; that the school buildings must meet certain standards; proprietors and teachers must be educators, among others, most of them are unapproved by the government.
However, with research by Developing Effective Private Education in Nigeria (DEEPEN) showing that more than 8,000 of such schools serve low-income earners and communities all over the state, the government appreciates their role in helping to educate about 60 per cent of school-age children who would have otherwise been out of school.
AFED President, Mrs Ifejola Esther Dada, said at the group’s Congress last week that its members had been able to prove that in addition to ensuring that less-privileged children are not denied education, they also contribute positively to the economy through employment.
“Many often refer to us as mushroom schools and we have faced several onslaughts from different angles threatening the existence of our schools without recourse to our value and importance in the scheme of educating our teeming children, especially those that fell in the categories of poor communities and low-income earners.
‘’Today, there are fact sheets about our operations, our values, our strength, our contributions to the economy of the state and country coupled with the figure of how much we are saving the government yearly,” said Mrs Dada, who was represented by the group’s Secretary, Mr Orji Kanu, at the event.
As a result, the government has made requirements for getting approval for schools more flexible and introduced a grading system to allow them move from one level of accreditation to the other. Also, the hard-stance inspection of the past has evolved to an evaluation seeking to support schools to improve on their service delivery in a friendly manner.
Office of Education Quality Assurance Director-General, Mrs Ronke Soyombo, said the education ministry was encouraging schools under AFED to upgrade their facilities.
“The administration is not interested in closing schools, if their activities are not criminal because we realised that you are really supporting the state government in providing education. But in doing this, we want you to do the right thing. Inspection is no longer about finding fault. We are about helping you to improve. AFED must ensure all unapproved schools are encouraged to seek approval,” she said.
However, some experts have warned that the relaxed position of the government towards registration should not be reason for proprietors running these low cost schools to think that all is well with their businesses.
DEEPEN Team Leader, Dr Gboyega Ilusanya, said AFED schools must begin to respond to the challenges of the recession by seeking ways to make their schools offer quality education at an affordable price.
He said though AFED schools are many and have increased over the years, research has shown that the school sizes have grown smaller. He said this called for a paradigm shift in the way schools were run and advised the proprietors to consider collaborating in such ways that they would benefit from scale.
He said: “Our research shows that school size is reducing. We have many small schools serving smaller populations. We have many schools with only 50-something pupils. Schools need to find a way to benefit from scale – offering affordable low-cost education at scale. They could think of operating as a chain of schools.”
Ilusanya also said AFED schools need to take quality and technology seriously. He said failure to do so would result in the risk of closure.
“Quality is something that has to be improved upon. You cannot rely on old methods used to bring us up and achieve excellence in the past to achieve excellence in the 21st century. Technology plays a role in improving learning and you cannot afford to be left behind. If you refuse to improve, your service will expire and it will not be needed. If regulation does not drive you out of business, you may find that it is competition that will drive you out,” he said.
Ilusanya said DEEPEN, which is a DFID-funded initiative to boost low cost private education in Nigeria, was working out ways to help such schools access services that would have been the preserve of big schools at affordable cost.
“What DEEPEN is trying to do is to incentivise service providers, who deliver services to the higher end of the market to look at the lower end and benefit from the numbers. And we have such firms coming on board offering technological services. Already, over 300 AFED schools have signed up,” he said.
On her part, Mrs Folasade Adefisayo, CEO, Leading Learning Ltd, lamented that many AFED members were not making use of technology to improve their schools. She said research showed that learning outcomes of pupils attending Nigerian schools were too low.
Though faulting the curriculum for focusing only on knowledge rather than imbuing pupils with skills, Mrs Adefisayo said there were ways schools could enrich their curriculum offerings such that their pupils could be at par with those trained in the best schools worldwide.
She said training for such skills were available on the Internet but lamented that many of the school owners did not know about them.
“British Council is offering free training to schools to teach the six core skills to their pupils – problem solving, critical thinking, creativity and innovation, student leadership, etc. These are not subjects; they are embedded into the way you run the school. I am one of the facilitators and the programme has been on for two years now but no AFED school is among those being trained. All the information is on the internet but none of you know about it and it is absolutely free,” she said.
Mrs Adefisayo, who is also the School Administrator of Osogbo High School, Osogbo, urged the schools to improve on their teaching and learning if they wanted to remain in business.
“You must improve the quality of teaching and learning. My job as a consultant is to watch teaching and learning in classrooms. I am troubled by what I see. I observed a JSS1 class from the first to the last period. The classes were so boring.
“To improve teaching and learning, it means professionalising the teachers and providing them with resources to help them. Train your teachers. Infrastructure is important, but the most important factor that determines quality in any school is the quality of teaching and learning. You are not paying attention to quality enough.You are as good as your weakest link. If you must make it your mantra that AFED schools are as good as the worst school, your schools will improve,” she said.
Mrs Adefisayo, a former executive director of Corona Schools Trust Council, said there were ways AFED schools could provide quality education at reduced costs.
“There are things a school can do to improve teaching and learning, which may not be as expensive as you think. For example, if a school determines to train its teachers, it can train do so in-house. There are organisations that support free training, such as British Council. Some people provide free textbooks and teaching in schools; you can train teachers to make classroom resources. Rather than just saying let’s buy charts, you can make your own charts and manipulables in the classroom and use a lot of things around them in the classroom to teach many things. You do not necessarily need to buy what big schools will buy; use whatever you have optimally to provide good enough education,” she said.
A former director in the Lagos State Ministry of Education, Mr Ibukun Daramola, also complained about the pedagogy used by many schools, urging AFED to address it if it seeks to contribute to the 2030 Education for All goal among the Sustainable Development Goals.
“There is lopsidedness in education. We are so focused on paper tests but nobody is talking about internalising the concept. When you teach a child, the idea is that he internalises the concept and reproduces it in another way,” he said.
Difavis Children’s School Proprietor, Alagbado, Mrs Agnes Edeko, said with changes in the education landscape, she would review her business model.
“This is an eye opener. It makes me to understand that I cannot keep doing things the same way. I have not been using technology seriously but will now do so,” she added.
