Bauchi State Government has been able to enrol over 2 million students into the various stages of school learning from senior secondary schools down to nursery schools across the state.
The disclosure was made by the Commissioner for Education, Jamila Dahiru while in a familiarisation meeting with the UNICEF Representative in Nigeria, Ms Christian Munduate.
According to her, Bauchi state currently has more than 5,060 schools across the state and has 30,752 Teachers that are placed in different schools within the state.
According to her, “We have several higher institutions, five that are domicile under the Ministry of Education including a university, Polytechnics, Colleges of Education and Vocational Training Colleges.”
The Commissioner added that “We also have quite several primary schools, junior and senior secondary schools under the ministry. These are all in our effort to ensure that we enhance the educational standard of the state.”
Jamila Dahiru added that “The state is also planning to recruit more teachers. You are aware of the issue around human resources for education and I’m happy that some of the recommendations come on the issue of retaining our teachers in various local governments.”
“The teachers who want to stay, we are having issues around that and we are working towards seeing that we retain some of these teachers even if it is looking at how we can compensate by paying more to those that are located in those areas,” she said.
The Commissioner further explained that the Bauchi state government is keen to recruit more teachers for effective service delivery, adding that more renovations of schools were ongoing in the state as approved by the State Governor, Sen Bala Mohammed Abdulkadir.
She explained that “This shortage of teachers, we experience more in the primary section than the second section including quality teacher ratio to pupils. We have a very good number of teachers in the senior secondary schools but we are doing very poorly when it comes to primary schools.”
According to her, “This is because we have more enrollment in the primary than we have in the secondary and that also speaks to the retention, that is the dropout we are all talking about.”
Jamila Dahiru further explained that the state government would work closely with the traditional institutions, development partners and other related agencies and ministries to ensure that the number of out-of-school children and dropouts was reduced to the barest minimum.
While responding, the UNICEF Country Representative, Cristian Munduate, said that UNICEF will continue to do everything in its power to help Nigerian governments at all levels to overcome its challenges in both education and health sectors.
Cristian Munduate expressed satisfaction with the efforts of the State Government in the areas of basic and non-formal education calling for more concerted efforts to achieve the set objectives.
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