Edo State governor, Godwin Obaseki has called for collaboration of the National Mathematical Centre and other stakeholders to sustain gains recorded in the state’s education sector through the Edo Basic Education Sector Transformation (EdoBEST) programmes.
He made the call during a visit by Promise Mebine, director/chief executive, National Mathematical Centre, a professor, at the Government House, in Benin City.
He said, “The saving grace for our country is education and not just sending children to school but having basic, qualitative and foundational education. Both literacy and mathematical skills have to be emphasized at that level.”
Obaseki noted that in Edo State, “We have made some significant steps in terms of strengthening foundational education through our EdoBEST programme.
“We started with the retraining of our teachers and it was quite interesting. If you look at the pedagogy of training teachers, particularly on teaching numeracy skills to the children, we can see that quite a lot of revolution has been undertaken.”
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He said, “But I cannot see a relationship between your centre and the revolution of our curriculum. That is one area I want you to look at. We’ve seen significant outcomes from the kids in primary one to six, and now we want to extend it to junior secondary schools.
“We need to sit with you and look at the federal government’s curriculum that has been suggested, to look at how to now join all of that with the technology platform that we are using, so that we can strengthen the understanding of the teachers.”
“We want to have more collaboration with you. We want to work with you. There are many nations where things have worked and there is nothing wrong in copying their ideas”, the governor added.
Mebine on his part lauded Obaseki for developmental strides in Edo. He said the centre was ready to partner with the state government and other state agencies for the provision of capacity building for teachers in primary and secondary schools, and supply of mathematical kits and training of teachers on the use of the kits.
