• Friday, March 29, 2024
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Poor learning outcomes, slow education policy implementation stifle competitiveness

Poor learning outcomes, slow education policy implementation stifle competitiveness

Nigeria’s inability to address challenges around her learning outcomes which is one of the poorest in the world and the slow pace of government to implement the right policy are major constraints to achieving competitiveness in education sector.

Educationists describe learning outcomes as significant and essential learning that learners have achieved, and can reliably demonstrate at the end of a course.

They are worried that the pitiable state of primary and secondary school levels of education in Nigeria is characterised by over-crowding in schools, reduced quality of staff, inadequate facilities in school. Above all, there is the problem of an absence of an academic standard that will develop pupils who are at par with their counterparts globally.

Nigeria sadly boost of one of the highest numbers of out of schools’ children in the world.  Estimated at over 13 million, this is a disproportionately higher percentage compared to other countries.

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“We lack all the four-key school-level ingredients for learning: prepared learners, effective teaching, learning focused inputs, and the skilled management and governance that pulls them all together” Hakeem Subair, founder of the One Million Teachers Project in an interview with BusinessDay said.

He opines that it is shameful and appalling that the largest oil producer in Africa and the sixth in the world would find itself in this mess. We cannot even boast of any strong sector, this is shameful

Florence Obi, former Deputy Vice Chancellor, University of Calabar, says statistics from Nigerian Bureau of Statistics shows a 23.1 percent unemployment rate as of Q3 2018 which only goes to show that education sector is on a downward slide.

According to her, “It is worrying that Nigerian graduates are unemployable and no Nigerian university featured in the world’s best 500 universities adding that in the African continent, the best Nigerian university trails some universities in Kenya, South Africa and Ghana.

Speaking to BusinessDay, Obi says the current education situation goes without saying that any country serious about preparing its future generation to be competitive in the global job market will ensure her children are actively engaged by investing in a sector as pivotal as education.

To her, “Quality and sustainable education has the potential to create employment, improve wellness, and create a well-informed or politically-informed citizenry”

Education professionals and economic stakeholders are of the views that for Nigeria to attempt a solution to the worrying education challenges there is need for managers of the education sector to give learning the attention that it deserves.

They aver that this involves using well-designed student assessments to gauge the health of our various education systems at local and national levels and providing actionable information to stakeholders about what is going wrong in their schools and in the broader society, so they can craft context-appropriate responses to improve learning.

“We need to align all stakeholders – recognising that all the classroom innovation will have little impact, if, because of technical, cultural, political, and other barriers, the system does not support learning”, they said.

By considering these barriers and mobilising everyone who has a stake in learning, we can support innovative educators on the front lines. To be aligned, parts of the education system must be coherent with one another. Alignment implies that learning is the goal of the various actors or components in the system. Coherence means that the components reinforce one another in achieving whatever goals we have set. When systems achieve both alignment and coherence, they are much more likely to promote student learning. The need for coherence means

Subair further opines that to revive the ailing education sector, we must have, at the school level – prepared learners, effective teaching, learning focused inputs, skilled management and governance that pulls them all together. “And we must align all actors – recognising that all the classroom innovation in the world is unlikely to have much impact if the system does not support learning”.

“I would say that everything should be centred around teaching and learning. School inputs, management, and governance must be geared towards enhancing the learner-teacher relationship if they are to improve learning”, he said.

 

KELECHI EWUZIE