Excellence in Child Education and Learning (EKOEXCEL) a Lagos State technology-driven initiative geared at bridging the gap in education service delivery with the infusion of technology into the basic education pedagogy has gotten global applause.
As the world focuses on building back better after COVID-19 and mitigating learning loss, the impact of EKOEXCEL’s transformational education intervention is being assessed and applauded globally.
EKOEXCEL is a child of circumstance birthed from a 2011 paper entitled ‘Private Responses to State Failure: The Growth in Private Education (and why) in Lagos, Nigeria, which highlighted why parents embraced private primary schools and shunned public ones.
The paper, which resulted in a 2010-2011 census of private schools in the state, found that despite public primary schools being fees-free, most parents shunned them because of overcrowding, poor/decaying infrastructure, and poor quality of instruction where children were not learning, among other reasons.
EKOEXCEL was launched in 2019 to provide quality education to both the rich and the poor in the public system and upskill teachers by leveraging technology. And since its formal take-off in January 2020, it has achieved remarkable results, including accelerating pupils’ learning, better classroom culture, and more robust lesson management. Parents are slowly returning to the public system.
Like many education systems, the outbreak of Covid-19 impacted education in Lagos. However, the EKOEXCEL programme and the governor’s vision enabled children to continue learning unlike many of their peers across Nigeria.
In response to the school closures across the state, EKOEXCEL launched blended learning with the adaptation of the EKOEXCEL @home initiative to ensure learning continued even in the hardest to remote and most poorly connected communities.
The @home programme consisted of self-study activity packets, learning guides, interactive audio sessions, virtual classroom experiences, and WhatsApp quizzes.
The state government continued to innovate and during the pandemic distributed 450,000 mp3s with pre-recorded lessons; by far the largest technology roll out in the continent for remote learning.
Read also: EKOEXCEL geared towards pupils, teachers’ global competitiveness- Alawiye King
Teachers during training are at the heart of the programme’s goals and the need and desire to strengthen the capacity of the workforce.
At the graduation of the EKOEXCEL’s Pre-service Professional Development and Technology Training Programme that trained over 10,000 public teachers that preceded the commencement, Sanwo-Olu reaffirmed his administration’s plan to transform the education sector, increase the Government’s investment and adopt a novel approach when his term began.
“We resolved to solve these problems through combining innovative technology, scientifically-based pedagogical approaches, effective training, support, and closing the learning gap such that all school-age children in Lagos State build a better and brighter future for themselves, their families and the teeming people of Lagos State.
“We resolved that this Government will empower teachers in every local government and strengthen their capacity to deliver quality education to our children.
“As a responsible government, we will continue the massive investment in this sector, with the training and retraining of our teachers, making the sector more ICT compliant, exposing our teachers to international best practices, as well as ensuring that our schools become a destination for work and learning,” he said.
Commendably, the recently released EKOEXCEL 2020-2021 Endline Fluency and Numeracy Evaluation has further justified the investment and affirmed the strategic intervention’s impacts.
The evaluation showed that EKOEXCEL pupils are making substantial progress in oral reading fluency and foundational numeracy compared to their performance before the initiative’s commencement.
It further showed that an average Primary 3 EKOEXCEL pupil is now reading at nearly the same fluency level as an average Primary 5 pupil from before the launch of the EKOEXCEL programme.
The evaluation also affirmed that EKOEXCEL is significantly improving learning over what existed before.
The assessment found that pupils have made outstanding progress across all grade levels since a baseline oral reading fluency evaluation in Lagos State public schools in 2019 (before the launch of EKOEXCEL). 2021 pupils are reading an average of 311percent more correct words per minute than their 2019 pre-EKOEXCEL counterparts, with the most significant gains among primary 1 pupils.
The state government has completed more than 1,097 school projects, upgraded and rehabilitated 322 dilapidated public schools, and furnished primary schools with 87,000 dual composite units of chairs and desks. These were some of the issues parents had complained about in the above-mentioned paper. To the government’s credit, infrastructure upgrade is ongoing to tackle quality of instruction and learning, a key shortcoming parents gave for choosing private primary schools instead of the public system; the governor launched the innovative and transformational EKOEXCEL.
