Dr. Adamu Jatau Noma is the director of the Federal Capital Territory, Universal Basic Education Board (UBEB). In this interview he speaks on the board’s preparation for the new school year.
Classes have just resumed after the long vacation. What arrangements have you made to address shortage of teachers in rural schools and ensure quality education?
Firstly of all, on furniture, if you go round to some of our schools both in the city centre and the rural areas, you will see contractors supplying furniture. If you go to the school in Life Camp, you will find out that we have supplied classroom furniture which will accommodate 320 students. So also if you check schools in the city, you will see new furniture being supplied.
The contractor has supplied some but it may take about four weeks before he supplies all the schools. But I also want to say that the furniture cannot go round our schools at the same time, they are supplied in bit, depending on what was captured in the procurement process.
For teachers, they have resumed and they are all working and I want to say that even during the holidays, they went through so many trainings that we organized to ensure quality education for the pupils. Here in the FCT, we provide accessible and affordable and at the same time quality educational services to all our schools. We also make sure that teachers go to classes on the first day of resumption in their respective schools.
I personally went to several schools here in Abuja to see what is happening, and we also looked at the enrolments and from what we have seen, the pupils are eager to study and they are all back to school because they have spent about eight weeks at home. The teachers are doing their work. I want to say that teaching and learning process started on the first day of resumption.
It was in the past that students were made to do general cleaning on the first day and that was why they were not willing to come to school then. But we have changed that pattern; what we do is that as soon as the schools open, the students use just about 30 minutes to clean their classrooms and lessons begin and then not only that, they are given the first continuous assessment test and nobody would want to miss that.
There are expectations of increase in public school enrolment. Are you adequately prepared for a surge in pupils’ population?
We are used to that. Pupils in primary six have moved to JSS1 class and those in JSS3 have also gone to senior secondary class so, we are used to the increment of students per class. Once others are exiting, some are coming and we all make provision for them because Abuja is a place where our enrolment figures always changes depending on the location.
If you go to an area where illegal houses are being demolished, parents will relocate to another area and in that case, some areas will have surge in enrolment. We are aware of all these indices and we prepare ahead. We have released our admission lists into JSS 1 classes and all principals are now enrolling students into their respective classes.
In the primary schools, pupils are enrolled into classes 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 so, we are prepared.
Have you built additional classrooms?
If you check our schools, especially in the rural areas, you will see where contractors are building or renovating more classrooms. Some contractors have finished work and they have been paid. I want to say that most people only know schools especially in the city centre, they are not aware that Abuja city centre schools accommodate just about 1 per cent of our schools, others are located in the sub-urban and rural areas. So while we pay attention to urban centers, we have to pay attention to rural areas also because students in rural schools will have to compete with their peers.
There are allegations that most of your teachers prefer urban schools. What are you doing to check the trend?
We are quite aware that we have shortage of manpower, but you don’t employ people when you cannot pay them. It is only in the FCT that teachers’ salaries are being paid regularly. Schools in urban areas like Garki or Area 1 are not necessarily congested but where we have congestions are in the suburban areas like Kubwa, Nyanya, Karu, Jikwoi, Gwagwalada because that is where the population is high and those who stay in the urban centres are the elite who send their wards to private schools.
I want to say that our public schools are far better than most private schools, people just love to show off that is why they send their children to expensive schools where they pay a lot of money. I must say that in our public schools, we have the most qualified teachers because all our teachers have a minimum of NCE qualification.
In our junior secondary schools, there are teachers who even have PhD’s. We have the best but the problems in public schools are the issue of discipline. In the civil service when someone commits an offence, there are laid down procedures that would be followed but in the private sector it is not done that way, if a teacher misses a day from work, the proprietor can take a decision immediately so, they fear that and take their jobs with extra care.
Secondly you find out that in the private schools, the classes are not congested, now the implication is that the teacher would be able to give more attention to every child unlike in the public schools where you have about 50 to 60 students in a class.
