Governor Babagana Zulum has lamented the poor quality of primary and secondary school education in Borno State. According to the governor, mos
Governor Babagana Zulum has lamented the poor quality of primary and secondary school education in Borno State. According to the governor, most of the high school leavers in the state are not qualified for university admission while those who get admitted struggle academically in tertiary institutions.
This was contained in a statement on Monday by the governor’s office titled, ‘Public schools: Tell me the truth, Zulum begs at meeting with Borno’s 84 principals’. Zulum hosted the principals at the Multipurpose Hall of the Government House in Maiduguri, on Sunday.
The statement quoted him as saying, “Education is the bedrock of any development. Without functional educational system, we shall continue to experience this Boko Haram insurgency in Borno. Look at the kind of students we are graduating from our public secondary schools, most of them do not qualify for admission into universities, even those who get admitted find it very difficult to cope.
“There is a general decline in the standard of education in public institutions all over the country. There is the lack of qualified teachers, inadequate teaching facilities, poor maintenance culture, general decay of infrastructure, Government’s inability to ensure monitoring and evaluation, centralised control by the ministry, unnecessary bureaucracy, and irregular training and retraining of teachers and other essential staff. There is poor data management and indiscipline amongst the major problems affecting the public school system.”
The governor, therefore, appealed to the school administrators to open up on the challenges confronting the performance of students. The teachers were said to have attributed the challenge to the faulty foundations of most school leavers.
Zulum was said to have directed “the immediate reintroduction of the common entrance examination” for primary six pupils, while insisting that “only pupils who pass the examination by securing a cut-off mark, should be eligible for admission into the first year of Junior Secondary Schools.
