Giving Edo Education its Pride of Place

Dr. Joan Osa Oviawe is the Chairperson, Edo State Universal Basic Education Board. She explained to some journalists in the state, including Funmi Ogundare the various steps the current administration has taken to give education its pride of place through its Basic Education Sector Transformation initiative as it enters its third year, among other issues. Excerpts:

Your board has expanded the Edo State Basic Education Sector Transformation (Edo BEST) initiative to the junior secondary school level, three years on, how equipped are your teachers to kick-start the initiative?

As you are aware, basic education extends to junior secondary school, we are trying to put in place the necessary tools that will make us to roll it out. In line with that, we have the Edo Supporting Teachers to Achieve Result (STAR) teacher recruitment programme. We had over 38,000 applicants, of this number, 11,000 were shortlisted for a computer-based test. From those that did the test, we would do a further review so that we can select the best 3,000 graduate teachers that will be hired amongst them. By the end of May, we ought to have shortlisted. We have started a further work on the curriculum for junior secondary school. Our executive governor has given us a marching order to educate students that have the requisite skills. Skills acqusition on technical and vocational education are now a strong components of our basic 7, 8 and 9 system in Edo State. We are ready to expand. We would have done that by now, but the COVID-19 held us back. We have to train these teachers on what to do before we take them into the classroom and introduce the Edo Best programme. So until we were able to train the teachers, we can’t start the programme in anyway.

What is your board doing to ensure a successful expansion?

We want to start at the initial stage which is JS one. We started the pilot phase of Edo BEST with the primary school, although it was at a very short term but we expanded quickly. So for junior secondary, we want to start from JS one, understand the rudimentary of junior secondary school, what the issues are and one of the lessons we have learnt from the current work we are doing is that how you plan and audition it is not always how it would work or play out in real life. There are always factors you don’t plan for. No matter the plan, in this environment that is so dynamic, there is so much happening. External factors also impact on the ability of our pupils to learn. In our own case, we discover that even while we were trying to ensure quality education, we also needed to tackle in some ways the issues of poverty. A child that is ill or hungry will not be able to learn no matter how well trained the teachers are and five star environment created. So we are still tackling some of those extraneous issues which are still impacting learning negatively.

How will your board ensure the sustainance of the Edo Best initiatives?

To ensure the sustainability of what we are doing now, it is really about having a system in place that manages education which is part of the work we are doing now under the framework of the governor’s civil and public transformation programme. Instead of just having people running round saying they work here, everybody must have a role and job description, key performance indicators and work plan. Our organisational work plan for this year was derived from starting with the individuals. As a learning and development officer, what are your key targets for this year? How does that link to your unit, departmental and organisational targets? So we believe that when we start putting in place all of these processes and procedures; and having proper documentation and utilising technology as well, we believe that it becomes part of the system and people will continue to do it.

What effort is your board making to ensure the delivery of quality teaching in Edo schools?

What we are doing in those schools is to ensure that our quality assurance officers are visiting to see what is happening. So because of that, every teacher knows that there are no sacred cows no matter who you are. If you do the wrong thing, you are out. So everybody is sitting up now. The only difference between our analogue and digitals is that the analogue schools are not using the scripted lessons that we are using now. In terms of other practices, on their own, the analogue teachers met with their colleagues who have gone through training to also get trained and they are already doing the same thing in their classrooms with the character board, songs and energisers.

Are you working with partners to support special needs schools in the state?

In the last three years, we have focused on the normal school, but in the next few months, we are going to be directing our attention to strengthening our special needs schools and ensuring that the special pupils are getting the requisite education and skills training that they need to live independent lives. We have started the work of testing our pupils. We have a couple of NGOs that will come and do test, so when they come to our schools for intervention, we tell them that rather than distribute biscuits, they should ask us what we want and we will in turn ask the schools what they want. In doing these and streamlining, we found out that we are now able to give the support that really makes sense. We are still in need of a lot more support. Most of what we are doing now is the state government’s effort and the federal through UBEC infrastructure. But majorly, we don’t have any international development partner. We are hoping that more and more people will get to see what we are doing. Already, we have gotten delegations from Rwanda and Sierra Leone, they have come to understudy what we are doing and Lagos, Ekiti has also come and we are hoping that more states and countries are going to come. Of all that have come, Rwanda is about to start a version of our programme. Lagos has started with the EkoExcel. So I think for us, we have a lot to share in terms of our experiences so far. We are a large ecosystem with over 12,000 teachers, over 300,000 pupils and over 700 non-teaching staff. In basic education, we are three or four times the size of the civil service in Edo State. So if you can reform us, you can reform anybody.

What is the state’s intervention for children who have visual impairment?

Under the inclusive education of the National Policy on Education, everybody is supposed to go to the same school irrespective of their impairment, but we are not there yet. We have some regular kids that are going to speacial schools. We feel that we have to go back and look at the kind of interventions they will need. What kind of specific training we have to give to the teachers so that they are not just in class and nothing is happening. We have special schools across the state, but for now, we want to strengthen the ones that we have and ensure that they are actually teaching. Part of that work also requires massive sensitisation because we found out that a lot of parents that have special needs children are still not taking them to school, particularly those of lower economic status. The resources are not there. So we want to destigmatise the stigma around special needs children and find the necessary support for them.

Before the introduction of Edo BEST, how would you describe the state of education in the state?

For several decades, the state of education in Edo State was deplorable. It got to a point that teachers will not come to school, and if they came, they were either coming to school to sell or giving the children chores to do. So there was really nothing going on. In fact one of the reasons we decided to scale very quickly was because when we started Edo BEST in our pilot schools, we realised that in schools where we didn’t have the initiative, nothing was going on. I remembered a particular incident when I went with some of my staff for monitoring. We had two teachers in the same classroom, teaching less than 25 children in the classroom. They were jisting. As soon as they sighted me, they quickly told the pupils to bring out their textbooks. So whether the pupils know how to read or not, the teacher does not care, sometimes they will ask the pupils to put their heads on the desk and sleep. So the pupils brought out their textbooks while I stood outside the classroom. I asked them the subjects they were supposed to be teaching, and at that point, one of them brought out a marker because they have a white board in the classroom. This was supposed to be the third week of resumption and she was just breaking the seal on the marker. I was able to deduce that for the last four weeks, she had not taught. There were so many instances of such. We realised that we had to instantly find the resources to scale. The other thing we did as part of the Edo BEST programme, was to abolish corporal punishment and replace it with discipline. So initially, people complained that if we spare the rod, we will spoil the child, but we said no. There is a distinct difference between corporal punishment and discipline. When a child comes to school late in the morning, you don’t ask them why they are late, you just start flogging them, what message are you sending to that child? If these children go through that regime of violence, by the time they get to junior secondary school, the canning doesn’t have any effect anymore. In search of love and affection, they will join a cult and start terrorising the teachers who used to terrorise them. So we said no more corporal punishment, but discipline. When a child does certain things, these are the various behaviour modification techniques that they need to use. We introduced the reward system. In the past, it used to be that it was the problematic children that will get the attention of the teacher, but now it is the ones that are doing well. We introduced songs, energisers and cheers so that the child can feel important. We introduced the character board and found out that even parents wanted to be part of it. When we had our open day, the parents will come and see their children and we will let them know about the character board that if they come to school early, their names will be on the board. So they now come early for open day because they want their names on the board.

How many primary schools are there in Edo State and what is the percentage of out-of-school children?

We have about 1,046 primary schools and about 305 junior secondary schools. Based on the data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), I think we have about 114,000 children out of school in Edo State.

How has the state performed in terms of UBEC counterpart funding?

We have performed very well. We just have two years to access it and COVID-19 pandemic really slowed us down and at a point nothing was happening and nobody was doing anything. We are slowly picking up now and by next year, we would have cleared all our counterpart funding. When Obaseki came in, Edo was able to clear to the first quarter of 2014, but now he has cleared up to 2020.

Has Edo State keyed into the national feeding programme, what level is it now in the state and how has the feedback been in terms of enrolment?

In Edo, the governor decided to do the national feeding programme for pupils from primary one to six. These are children, some have food and some don’t have. So how do you explain it? The first set of schools that started the feeding programme witnessed an enrolment spike, even pupils were now going to where they were feeding them which necessitated us to quickly expand the programme. In Edo, we have the least number of out-of-school children in Nigeria. So that is a direct result of the effort of the governor in basic education reform. Even though we are the least, we are not resting on our oars, we are devising different ways to bring back the ones that are out of school.