Stakeholders in the education sector have urged the Kano State government to expedite actions towards addressing the shortage of teachers in the rural parts of the state.
The stakeholders noted that some schools are overstaffed in metropolitan areas, while many teachers are needed to fill a vacuum created by lower teacher deployment to rural communities.
This was part of the submissions of the stakeholders during the presentation of learning outcomes assessment in Kano State by the Partnership for Learning for All in Nigeria (PLANE) on Thursday.
Grassroots Parrot reports that PLANE is a seven-year education programme funded by the UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), working with the federal and target state governments to improve learning outcomes.
In Kano State, the programme’s foundational and accelerated learning initiative has reached a total of 265,011 children across 11 Local Government Areas (LGAs) and 1,112 schools.
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Also, PLANE recently supported the conduct and dissemination of findings from an assessment conducted after two years of intervention to improve the delivery of basic education in target LGAs in Kano.
According to the results presented by PLANE on Thursday, there have been notable improvements in literacy and mathematics in supported schools across the LGAs.
Commenting on the programme, Joseph Wales, FCDO Education Advisor, harped on the need to further strengthen partnerships so as to improve education for all in the state.
“PLANE and the British Council have demonstrated the potential of these approaches to improve learning outcomes despite significant challenges. Now we must use these as a catalyst for working in partnership at all levels in Kano—community, LGA, and state—in order to improve education for all.” He said.
On his part, the Deputy National Team Lead of PLANE, Sam Achimugu, said the Kano State Government has been very committed, and PLANE has been engaging closely to ensure that the progress we have made so far is sustained and scaled up.
He said, “We are working with the government to ensure learners in the state perform better in foundational literacy and numeracy skills, beyond the LGAs where we currently work. However, there are some systemic challenges that stakeholders need to collaboratively address.
“Data collated through PLANE’s assessment and data received from School Support Officers showed that in PLANE-supported LGAs in Kano, about 25% of schools have only one teacher to teach all six primary grades.
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“Data also showed that schools in these LGAs have an average of 131 children per teacher, which is close to four times UNESCO’s recommended pupil-teacher ratio (PTR) of 35:1.
“Both teachers and learners demonstrated high levels of absenteeism, and in about 79% of Kano classrooms, most children do not have pencils or exercise books.” He added.
Reacting to the findings, stakeholders commended the efforts of PLANE for the results achieved in improving learning outcomes, urging the state government to deploy more teachers to the rural communities.
In his remarks, Board Secretary, Kano State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB), Hajia Amina Umar, who represented the SUBEB Chairman, said the board has started taking actions on most of the identified issues.
“Most of the issues raised here, from the side of SUBEB, we have started taking actions, and the state government is very committed, as demonstrated through the declaration of a state of emergency in education in the state.” She said.
Umar commended the newly elected LGA Chairmen for honouring the dissemination event as it showed their commitment to working together.
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“The LGA Chairmen of the intervening local governments are here, and they have a key role to play because it is within their mandate to appoint competent Education Secretaries so that part of these problems can be solved.
“At the school level, there are also issues with leadership. A competent education secretary will be able to shun interference and appoint competent headteachers to manage the schools, and that will address the issue of absenteeism and time lost by students not being in school at the right time.”
The dissemination event brought together stakeholders from the State Ministry of Education, the State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB), LGAs, CSOs, and development partners FCDO and the British Council.
In response to the findings, participants all agreed on the need to address the systemic issues and participated in the development of a follow-up strategy towards addressing the same.
PLANE, since its inception, has reached over one million learners across Kano, Kaduna, and Jigawa states with interventions aimed at strengthening foundational literacy and numeracy skills and improving education delivery in general.
