It has been discovered that in Misau Local Government Area, Bauchi State, not less than 79 schools have only one Teacher each who teaches every subject. The Director of School Services, Bauchi State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB), Korijo Umar, divulged this information during a Q & A with journalists amid a media dialogue. The dialogue was organised by the United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF) to foster the enrolment of out-of-school children in Alkaleri and Misau LGAs, Bauchi.
Providing answers to questions at the Central Primary School in Misau LGA, Usman stated that majority of the schools in the LGA and all over the state lack adequate teachers to teach students, although there is no school without teaching staff in the state. They are present in all the schools in the state, but that they are inadequate. He added that Misau LGA is better when compared to other LGAs as the situation of schools there are worse. He stated that the work that is been done is to find out where they are congested and ask for their redeployment.
Misau Central Primary School has over 1,700 pupils, with 24 teaching staff.
He added that they have also informed people from SUBEB to look out for schools with a large teaching staff, so that some of them can be redeployed to two or three schools, depending on the number they find. In Misau Central Primary School, there are over 1,700 pupils, with only 24 teachers. With proper calculation, it is apparent that the minimum standard of teacher and pupil ratio is 45 — a ratio that is not present in Nigeria. In this Central Primary school, the ratio equals 72 students per class.
In the Bauchi metropolis, it is much worse as classes that have about 150, 200, 220 or even 250 pupils have only one teacher. With this calculation, it becomes apparent that the situation in the discussed school is better. Whereas, in other schools where the students are not up to 1,000 there are more than 30 teaching staff who teach them, many of whom are women. Also speaking, the Education Secretary of Misau Local Government Education Authority, Alhaji Abdu, when questioned about the lack of adequate manpower in the school, also affirmed that the situation in Misau is better compared to other LGAs.
Assignment of staff to schools is done by SUBEB.
The education secretary said that the teachers in the school can still be managed as it is considered as one with large amounts of teachers, even though they are inadequate. He stated that there are schools with more than 600 pupils and only seven teaching staff, which will be surprising to people who visit. He asserted that what the Local government Education Authority does is to build a collaboration with the SBMC to ensure that the schools have volunteers.
When asked about the step that is been taken to combat inadequate manpower in the school and others in other LGAs across Bauchi State, the Director of School Services, asserted that SUBEB is not responsible for the employment of teachers. Their duty is to assign teachers to schools. However, the Teachers Service Commission is in charge of the employment of teaching staff for schools in partnership with SUBEB. In their collaboration, the duty of SUBEB is to supervise the employment.
UNICEF and SUBEB enrolled 37 out-of-school pupils back in school.
According to Umar, when the names of potential teaching staff are given to them, they conduct verifications on them to discover those who are competent enough for the job, those who have incorrect certificates, those who used someone else’s certificate, and other necessities. However, based on a new system tagged “Teaching at the Right Level”, SUBEB and UNICEF enrolled a total of 37 out-of-school pupils — 20 males and 17 females — at the Central Primary School in Misau.
