By Nosakhare Agbonigiarhuoyi
The Edo State Governor, Mr. Godwin Obaseki, representatives of the World Bank, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) met in Benin City on Tuesday to review the gains, challenges and other trends in the State’s education sector.
Welcoming the development partners to the State, Obaseki maintained that his administration was committed to sustaining the standards of the Edo Basic Education Sector Transformation (EdoBEST) 2.0 program, and expressed concern about the long-term plan for the country’s education sector.
He said: “For now, it’s about the thought leadership; it’s about strategy; and how does it all tie together into the long term as a country. There are three areas we are still struggling with that we need some help and thinking through.
“How do we keep our eyes on what is going on in the private schools is one issue that we need to think through. How do we extend some of the State’s subsidies to those schools so that we can pair into what’s happening, how these children are being taught, and what they are being taught?
“The second issue for us is how do we realign education policy in the country?”
He continued: “You can see what we have done over the last five years with kids from primary education 1 to primary education 6. Now, they are moving over to the junior school.
“How do we ensure we don’t drop the standards for them; how do we ensure that by the time they are finishing their nine years of basic education, they have a pathway to what they want to be in life?
“We are trying to emphasize Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TEVET) and from primary education 9, you can either go the TEVET route or the normal secondary school route. These are some of the policy challenges we need to begin to put our hands around.”
On his part, the World Bank Director for Global Education, Jaime Saadevedra, commended the Edo State Government for being realistic with regard to the challenges the State is facing in the education sector.
He recommended that the State government should further improve the quality of public schools as this will spur those in private schools to migrate to the public schools; and see to the inclusion of parents in the State’s education reforms.
Saadevedra said: “You are already making some good competition with the private schools. To start with, your teachers are there; which is a big difference from some years ago. So, the difference between public and private schools has been reduced.
“What parents need is to have information on what is happening inside the classroom. It’s very difficult to understand if in the classroom, learning is happening or not.
“They don’t necessarily know that now there is a smaller difference between the public and the private schools. So I think there has to be some work on that front.”
He added: “There needs to be some sort of regulation and supervision of private schools. In many systems in which public and private coexist, a role for the public sector is to regulate and supervise what is happening in those private schools.”
The team lead on scripted lessons for secondary schools in Edo State, Imoukhuede Okhiran, shed light on the progress that has been made in the State’s education sector, particularly in the area of capacity building for teachers by sharing his experience from 2018.
