From Olanrewaju Lawal, Birnin Kebbi
The Executive Chairman of Kebbi State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB), Prof Suleiman Khalid, has disclosed that over 850,000 pupils are in both primary and Junior Secondary Schools (JSS) in the state.
Khalid stated this while speaking at the stakeholders meeting on the conduct of the Kebbi State national Personnel Audit with the Universal Basic Education Commission(UBEC) team from Abuja, in Birnin Kebbi.
“Our aims especially on the data of our staff, teaching and non-teaching, pupils enrollment is aggravating by gender, age, class, school, town, LGAs, both Primary and JSS, public and private schools. At present, a total of 857,185 pupils are currently enrolled in basic institutions in the state. Out of these,65% are in public, that is 534,584 and 35% of them are in private schools and that is 302,601 pupils,” he said.
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“If you look at them, it is more than one-third of them are taken by these private schools. These pupils are enrolled in 2,320 private primary schools and 426 via private and public secondary schools. In addition, we have a total of 5,343 non-formal learning centres enrolling 350,000 learners, they were thought by 3,912 facilitators. I am referring to learners in LGEAs under the BESDA programmes and the 15,900 facilitators,” he said.
Khalid added that all the updated information needed on the level of the completion of the projects done, or the ongoing by the SUBEB in the state, is currently on their website, stressed that private schools which have been a good partner in providing quality education in the state with an enrollment of 35 per cent of pupils have employed over 4,141 personnel in the state.
He added that the motive behind the national personnel auditing was to provide answers to a series of questions on how to move the education sector forward in the state and Nigeria in areas of teaching, learning environment as well as enrollment of the girl-child.
According to him, “What we are doing in Kebbi State is to provide quality assurance to these schools and also to the learning environment. Are there enough classrooms? Are they in good condition and how many of them are in a dilapidation situation? And these have to do with all the facilities in the schools and the toilet facilities which could be a determining factor for attending the schools, especially for a girl child.
“Not only that, how many schools have a washing system, that is hand borehole, water, how many teachers do we have in these schools and how many of them are qualified and what is their level of qualification? The minimum qualification for a teacher now is NCE. How many of them are teaching in public and private schools? These are the questionnaires for this activity. We can’t plan without adequate data. What they are bringing out is to update the 2018 national personnel audit and as I said, Kebbi State has the most vibrant education management system in Nigeria.
“Virtually, all the information required on our personnel is on our website. Everything you need which have to do with the children, facilities on the ground, including physical facilities, completed and the ongoing project’s information are all on our website”, he said.
Earlier, the Team Leader of UBEC from Abuja to Kebbi State, Prof Onoja Onuche, explained that the main objective of the exercise was to check out the enrolment of pupils, quality of the teachers, both teaching and non-teaching staff and the learning environment stressed that, Kebbi State has done well in the past and hoping that the state would perform excellent again in the audit exercise.