Says New Policy Focuses on Complete Child, Complete Youth, Complete Citizen
In
this piece, Governor Rauf Aregbesola of Osun State dismisses the criticism of
the education policy of his administration.
On
Haphazard Claim
The Osun State Education Policy our administration is currently implementing is not a haphazard, impressionistic voyage. It is rather a comprehensive and holistic response to a scandalous educational rot, which we found, at the inception of our government, unbefitting of a state and people that were part of the first revolutionary educational policy in Nigeria; by which I mean Chief Obafemi Awolowo and his Action Group (AG) party’s free primary education policy, which started in the old Western Region in 1955.
The Osun State Education Policy our administration is currently implementing is not a haphazard, impressionistic voyage. It is rather a comprehensive and holistic response to a scandalous educational rot, which we found, at the inception of our government, unbefitting of a state and people that were part of the first revolutionary educational policy in Nigeria; by which I mean Chief Obafemi Awolowo and his Action Group (AG) party’s free primary education policy, which started in the old Western Region in 1955.
Our
policy therefore seeks an integrative approach to the education of our children
and youth. This spans: Education Infrastructure in O’Schools: massive
building of new school structures to replace the present dilapidated ones,
within the framework of our schools reclassification system; standardised
school uniforms in O’Uniform: to rebrand Osun public schools as well as create
employment for designers, tailors and allied artisans, as employed by
Omoluabi Garments Factory, the biggest of its type in the whole of West Africa;
Innovative teaching materials and learning aids, which clear showpiece is the
award-winning Opon Imo, the
computer tablet that captures all the textbooks in
the school curriculum for high schools; good nutrition to fully develop the
physical and mental readiness of our children for life-long learning: in
O’Meals, the schools feeding system for the elementary cadre, in the first four
years of school life, with a possible extension to the higher cadres of
schooling when resources allow; co-curricular activities as integral parts of
the school curriculum: in O’Calisthenics, physical education drills, since a
sound mind sits pretty well in a sound body; and educational competitions in
quiz and debates; games and sports; and subject co-curricular societies like
the Literary and Debating Societies, Science Clubs, Geography Societies,
the Omoluabi Boys and Girls
Clubs, etc; technical and vocational education: in
the implementation of the Osun Life Academy Programme, which caters for
training and retraining, particularly outside formal school walls, for Osun
citizens not so academically gifted but that can acquire technical and
vocational skills, with no age barriers, who can then set up their own
micro-businesses to earn a living; entrepreneurial education: in the curriculum
implementation for functional and entrepreneurial education, a crucial missing
link in the Nigerian educational system as presently designed.
These
are the major pillars of our education policy. But these cover the formal
education school years from age 6. The pre-school period, from birth to
age 6, comes with a strong stress on parent-government cooperation and
collaboration.
For starters, the policy does not invest in nursery and
other pre-school activities because government expects parents and guardians to
contribute their own rich quotas to preparing their children for school
readiness. We therefore expect parents to nurture their children in the
pre-school years. The children and wards need the strong emotional
platform that caring parents and guardians provide to be well and truly ready
for school.
Therefore,
our education policy is tailored towards making the Osun public schools system
produce the complete child, to become the complete youth and grow up to become
the complete citizen, empowered in learning and in character, in the best
tradition of the Yoruba Omoluabi. That way, they would be equipped,
culturally and academically, anywhere they find themselves in the world, aside
from becoming patriots, to take care of their state and country that had
earlier taken care of them.
The
Genesis
The Osun Education Policy was brewed at the Osun Education Summit, held
February 7-8, 2011, at the University Auditorium, Osun State University,
Osogbo. The summit, chaired by Prof. Wole Soyinka, had the theme:
“Resolving the Education Crisis in Osun State: Bridging Analysis and
Implementation Gaps”. It also had sub-themes, viz: “Resolving the
Education Crisis in Osun State”, “Quality Assurance and Capacity Building”,
“Role of Stakeholders”, “Early Childhood and Basic Education”, “Funding
Approaches”, “Curriculum Implementation for Functional and Entrepreneurial
Education” and “Special Education and Language in Education”. The policy
was forged from the summit’s communiqué and observations.
The
summit established the following challenges as fuelling the crisis in education
that necessitated the present reforms: infrastructure neglect- basically in
collapsed school structures; crowded classrooms; poor funding; teachers’ low
morale; lack of instructional materials; high fees in tertiary institutions;
low bursary rate and poor performances of Osun students in both internal and
external examinations, among others. These serious challenges therefore
inspired counter strategies, starting with a complete restructuring of
educational administration, to turn around the rot.
On
Restructuring
Since the critical success factor for any reform is sound management and
welfare, at the heart of the new education reforms is a restructured Education
Administration Modality. This involves creating specialised agencies to
address key components in public schools management. To this end, the old
Teaching Service Commission (TESCOM) has been decentralised into three Education
Districts, with territorial jurisdictions covering the three senatorial
districts in the State of Osun.
These
three Educational Districts are headed by a Tutor-General, an equivalent of a
Permanent Secretary in the Osun Civil Service. These Districts are the
primary drivers of the new policy, with TESCOM serving as a central clearing
house, and TESCOM itself acting in concert with the Osun Ministry of Education.
The new reforms have also addressed teachers’ welfare and that of other
non-teaching staff. To this end, the Teachers Establishment and Pension
Office (TEPO) was set up. As the name clearly implies, aside from teacher
recruitment, TEPO takes charge of human capacity development in Osun public
schools: teachers’ career advancement, training and retraining, teaching
incentives, promotion, prompt payment of salaries and allowances. TEPO not only
tackles teachers’ welfare while they are in active service; it also looks after
their pension after retirement.
The
third leg of the Education management and welfare reforms is the strengthening
of the State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB). SUBEB is the agency
that collaborates with the Federal Government on the national policy of free
and compulsory education for every Nigerian child in the first nine years of
formal education, now captured in the national scheme of Primary (six years)
and Junior Secondary (three years).
Although,
the national scheme has been slightly adjusted under our own School
Reclassification System, the adjustment, I must say, is just administrative
regrouping which by no means contrasts with the national 6-3-3-4 system.
Needless to say, the reforms have led to a radical increase in grants and
subventions for the administration of public primary and secondary
schools. Indeed, total grant for the 1378 pubic primary schools in Osun
jumped from N7.4 million a year to N424 million a year, a quantum leap by any
account.
On
Reclassification
Our reforms make a slight reclassification in the national 6-3-3-4 system, with
no fundamental alteration of the scheme. What we have done is tinker with
the 6-3-3 grouping — the 12 years of primary and secondary education before the
four years of tertiary education. In that regrouping, the last two years
of the three years of junior secondary has been extracted to form a middle
school cadre. We therefore came up with the following reclassification
and their age brackets: elementary School: Ages 6-9 (Grades 1-4); middle
School: Ages 10-14 (Grades 5-9); and high School: Ages 15-17 (Grades 10-12)
These
classifications are not arbitrary. They come with plausible and logical
socio-cultural reasons. To start with, the Elementary School is conceived
as a neighbourhood school, a walking distance from the pupils’ homes.
Again, the Elementary School concept comes with high parental input, since the
children, in their formative stages, are still under close watch by their
parents and guardians.
The
Middle School, though meant for older children, would be cited no more than two
to three kilometres from where the pupils live. The High School is sited
further away, since the children, now in high school, have become young adults,
able to cope with public transport from their homes to school and back.
However, there are plans on the way to provide school buses, which fares would
be discounted to make commuting to and from school even easier.
On
Feeding
The school feeding scheme, branded O’Meal and currently being implemented in
the Elementary School, with possible extension to higher cadres when resources
allow, is founded on the principle of good nutrition as incentive for learning
readiness. Right now, over 254, 000 school children enjoy highly
nutritive daily lunch under a scheme that has been lauded home and abroad.
This
scheme has also greatly boosted enrolment in elementary schools by no less than
25 per cent. But an added economic advantage is the boon to farmers as
the scheme greatly aids poultry, food crops and animal husbandry, by working
with farmers who have served as vendors supplying the foods. O’Meal is
conceived as backward integration for a renewed Osun agricultural programme, to
partly serve as ready market for farmers’ produce and boost their income.
On
Infrastructure Development
Branded O’School, the Osun School Infrastructure Development Programme is a
logical extension from the Osun Schools Reclassification Programme. Under
O’School, there are ongoing plans to build 100 elementary school, 50 middle
school and 26 high school models. But the building is not
haphazard. Since many of the old schools are aged and dilapidated and the
state does not have the funding to replace each and every of the run-down
school buildings, the reclassification policy is structured on maximising
resources.
This
means in the new school models, communities would have to share school
facilities in consolidated schools, against the old practice of each community
insisting on its own schools, even if the pupil population is sparse and there
are hardly enough teachers to go round. This therefore explains the
merger of schools which some critics may have clearly misunderstood. The
motive is not to inconvenience communities or missions. It is rather to
maximise Osun education resources, in such a way, as Jeremy Bentham said, to
ensure the greatest happiness of the greatest number. That, I believe,
our O’School reforms are achieving.
The
concept of standard uniforms for Osun public schools, branded O’Uniform, was
conceived with an eye to rebrand public schools in the state as well as reflate
the Osun economy to employ as many designers, tailors, local textile workers
and allied artisans as possible, in the production of school uniforms.
This culture-fired indigenous and standardised uniform for 750, 000 public
school pupils, which the Omoluabi Garments Factory is currently implementing,
has received international commendations from UNESCO. The first sets of
the uniforms, I must also mention, were provided free to the pupils.
On
Opon Imo
Clearly, the most revolutionary element of the education reforms is the Opon
Imo, the customised computer tablet that contains 63 textbooks covering 16
subjects, 800 minutes of virtual class lessons, and 40, 000 past questions for
WAEC and tertiary education matriculation examinations, conducted by the Joint
Admissions and Matriculations Board. These have been provided free for all the
150, 000 high school pupils in Osun. Aside from the curriculum textbooks,
Opon Imo also contains copies of the Bible, the Quran and the Ifa Divinity, to
underscore the place of Osun as epicentre of Yoruba culture, as well as the
multi-religious reality of the state, in the best tradition of equal
opportunities.
The
Opon Imo initiative has proved a masterstroke, both to save costs and provide
qualitative learning aids by the instrumentality of ICT. Though the
Education Summit recommended approaching publishers for mass production of
texts in the school curriculum to lower costs, the Opon Imo initiative has
proved even better than the summit’s suggestion. It has rightly been
hailed by the United Nations as a revolutionary learning innovation to help
Africa and the rest of the Third World improve its educational capacity.
On
Co-curricular Activities
Co-curricular activities in schools are not new. They were an integral
part of schools till the 1970s and 1980s when they somewhat declined. The
reforms have therefore succeeded in bringing them back to the education
front-burner: schools sports, literary and debating societies, as well as
subject clubs and societies. But the clear star of the reforms, in this
sector, is calisthenics, under the O’Calisthenics programme, that stresses
physical fitness as a prelude to mental fitness.
On
Other Aspects of Reforms
Other aspects of the Osun Education reforms include the downward review of
school fees in all Osun tertiary institutions; non-discriminatory school fees
regime – Osun indigenes and non-indigenes pay the same fees in Osun tertiary
institutions; upward review of bursary and scholarships; promotion of technical
and vocational education, through the implementation of the Osun Life Academy
Programme; payment of external examination fees of final year students in
public high schools and the sponsorship of 92 UNIOSUN medical students to
complete their clinical studies in Ukraine.
On
Gains
The reforms have had tremendous impacts on the Osun educational
competitiveness. To start with, Osun, from a 34th placing among Nigeria’s
36 states in 2010, moved to 18th position in 2011 and 8th position in 2012, in
performance rankings in the West African School Certificate Examinations
(WASCE). Pupils from the state have also chalked up improved performances
in national and international competitions, according to compilations by the
Osun Ministry of Education. Also, the reforms have earned a partnership
with UNESCO to build a regional teacher training institute in the state, and a
fresh programme in the area of adult
education.
Culled from Vanguard
No comments:
Post a Comment