Finally, pre-primary learning is here but facing uphill battle
Hadiza and her classmates are excited to be in primary school. The teacher chalks the topic on a portion of wall blackened to serve as board. The class goes silent in anticipation. Down the corridor, away from the block of classrooms, three rooms are walled off, separate from the chaos of primary school. Here, 95 […]
Hadiza and her classmates are excited to be in primary school. The teacher chalks the topic on a portion of wall blackened to serve as board. The class goes silent in anticipation.
Down the corridor, away from the block of classrooms, three rooms are walled off, separate from the chaos of primary school.
Here, 95 children aged between three and six get their first taste of formal learning, public school style. It is called early childhood care and education (ECCE).
Three instructors teach the children anything from numeracy and reading to Arabic. But they spend much of the day in play—playing and learning.
One nanny sees to their bodily needs—anything from changing diapers to washing up and feeding.
It is another day at Kofar Nasarawa Model School, under control of Kano Municipal local government education authority in Kano state.
Coming into light
Pre-primary education has always been in Nigeria: the nursery, kindergarten and crèches. But that were the preserve of private education. Public schooling began at age six, straight at primary 1.
That changed in 2012 when Nigerian education authorities enacted a policy of pre-primary education. It directed every primary school to create a pre-primary section, complete with dedicated manpower and resources.
“The basic education system changed from 6-3-3-4 to 1-6-3-3-4 overnight and pre-primary education ceased to be a privilege of just the wealthy,” said one expert at the World Bank mapping the landscape of Nigeria’s pre-primary education. The expert’s identity cannot be revealed until the mapping is completed and the data published.
“In theory, it was now accessible to all 3-to-5-year-old children across [all] the strata of society.”
Plenty of research backed the move to dispel notions that pre-primary learning was all about giving children free reign to play all day.
“It is only when you are not a teacher that you will say that,” says the headteacher overseeing pre-primary schooling at Kofar Nasarawa.
“Even clapping can tell you the sound of a letter. And when a child does well, the class cheers him by clapping,” he explains.
“The singing isn’t mere singing. A lot is formalized. When you see, talk, touch, you remember more. Everything goes into their memory.”
In six years since 2012, few states have taken up the mandate to introduce and fund ECCE—and few primary schools have opened centres for pre-primary learning.
Kofar Nasarawa’s programme is only recent. Its pupils are yet to graduate, but their teachers already notice better inter-personal communication and confidence among their 3-to-5-year-olds. Teachers here anticipate even more—like farmers looking toward bumper harvest.
“Between birth and three years, we have the highest rate of the child’s brain growth within this age range,” says Emem Opashi, ECCE specialist and founder of Student Resource Centre, which trains teachers in ECCE.
“Children can actually be taught more, learn more, assimilate more skills that will impact the rest of their lives. If they are able to expose them to great learning experience, help them to discover, explore in fun and engaging ways, they assimilate much more than people give them credit for.”
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The real difference
By geography and logic, pre-primary education isn’t primary education.
“The learning environment is quite different,” says the headteacher at Kofar Nasarawa pre-primary unit.
“This is the first time. You have to give them the chance to feel as if they are still at home. Let them play but learn the rules and regulations of the school.
“Most of their learning goes with singing, clapping, which is quite different from primary 1 to 6.”
Research also show access to pre-primary education smoothens a child’s transition from home to school, sharpens the child’s cognition and in the long term reduces class repetition and school drop-out rates.
By extension, it reduces the burden on the education system, improving an individual’s potential to earn income in the future.
The focus is physical, social, emotional, language and cognitive development.
“It is not the period where you teach them to read and write,” says Swadchet Sankey, ECCE specialist at United Nations Children’s Fund, which helped train teachers at Kofar Nasarawa.
“It is the period where you teach basic concept of numbers and letters. Social development, how to make friends, regulate their emotions, express their feelings, respect other people. Simple things like taking turns, saying please, helping the person next to you. You build confidence.”
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| A pupil enjoys bouncing time at an ECCE centre in Diepsloot, Johannesburg. |
Keeping commitments
Nigeria’s move toward ECCE is “part of efforts targeting achievement of SDG 2030, goal 4 target 2—all boys and girls should have access to early childhood and pre-primary learning,” says Aleshin Olumayowa, of the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) which coordinates basic education.
“That’s what we are trying to do.”
But only 36 in 100 Nigerian children aged up to five or six attend any organised early childhood education programme. For years, Osun wrote any public pre-primary education out of law. Only recently has the state government changed its stance to accommodate the programme in its education budget.
Kano recorded 269,167 enrolments in 2014. Nationwide enrolments topped 3 million the same year.
Six years on, many public schools have developed a pre-primary wing but they are yet to catch up to the private nursery schools and crèches that command the attention of parents.
Shaky funding
UBEC is Nigeria’s response to international covenants it has signed, says Olumayowa.
It is funded from 2% of the country’s consolidated revenue. This year alone, its allocation tops N100 billion. For every naira provided by a state, UBEC provides one naira to match. It is the matching-model through which basic education is funded. Pre-primary education gets 5% of the total and it is the state’s business to use the funds accordingly.
“Unfortunately, this rarely happens and pre-primary schools often do not receive any allocation,” says the expert mentioned previously.
“It isn’t just enough to say government is ready to fund one year of pre-primary education. We need to ask ourselves, this one year we are funding, what is the quality?” says Sankey.
There are questions on everything from inadequacy of toilets and hygiene to safe drinking water and picture books.
“Pre-primary education is a part of the basic education system, so we should stop treating it as though it is an addendum,” says Sankey.
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| A pupil learns colours and shapes at an ECCE centre made from repurposed shipping container in Diepsloot, Johannesburg. South Africa’s ECCE is government driver and implemented by private sector innovations |
Plenty more needed
Kofar Nasarawa charges parents money to enrol their children in pre-primary classes, but the tuition hardly covers its needs. The parent-teachers association chips in to provide learning facilities.
“We have great failure of education in Nigeria,” says the headteacher. “We need to tell the government to come to our aid to get teaching materials. The money we charge to render these classes is not enough to carry out all activities and lessons we expect.”
There is a lot they need, and it isn’t just play toys.
“It costs quite a bit to run early childhood centres. You need a higher staff-to-children ratio, you need specified amount of space because children are very mobile, and more resources to enhance their lesson,” says Opashi.
“The problem is: centres in most government schools, they lack maintenance and funding, all the way down to something basic as the right teachers.
“People are being churned out of colleges of education with qualification in early child education. It is a new qualification, it is all very theoretical. They need to now come into the reality and practicality of taking care of these children in real life.”
Not just manpower, but adequate manpower
At least 56,588 ECCE teachers are registered in Nigeria at last count—two in three of them female.
Many only have an NCE, OND or some teacher training.
Higher-degree teachers with or without teaching qualifications are fewer.
Colleges of education have moved to create ECCE departments to train teachers in the specialty.
Around 4 in 10 accredited colleges of education provide training in ECCE.
Few teachers graduate and even fewer are readily employed to teach in public pre-primary schools due to budget constraints.
Without new hires, primary school teachers are deployed to pre-primary classes.
“Unfortunately, these teachers are often not trained and even when they are trained, they often perceive the move to be a demotion and are unwilling to teach in these pre-school classes,” the ECCE expert said.
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| Meal time. ECCE teachers focus on keeping environment and situation to feel as though children never left home |
Solutions arising?
At least 10% of UBEC’s funding is to train teachers through its state and local arms.
The advocacy for ECCE is to get state and national UBE organs “using their training funds to scale those training for pre-primary teachers,” Sankey says.
“Over the years, trainings are being done but pre-primary teachers are left on the backburner.”
Private pre-primary education has long existed, and they are currently filling the gaps in policy-mandated early learning. But they are not meant to antagonize, says Opashi.
“Government can leverage on the private sector, make policies while private sector runs the centres,” she suggests.
“One teacher to a 100 pupils in a pre-primary class is unheard of. Government can meet up, especially in local funding.
“You have a number of teachers and they are not properly qualified, the private sector is actually there to fill in that gap at the moment.”
The school bell tolls. It is 11am: lunch time. The five-year-olds stream in excitement out of their classes. Some climb swings and slides; others dig into lunch boxes. Another day at school.