‘We close unregistered schools if there are alternatives’

The Director, Department of Quality Assurance, FCT Education Secretariat, Salihu Omehi Yahaya, explains the workings of his organization People once in a blue moon, hear about quality assurance and control in education. What role does your department play in the school system? The major function of this department is registration, accreditation and evaluation of educational […]

The Director, Department of Quality Assurance, FCT Education Secretariat, Salihu Omehi Yahaya, explains the workings of his organization

People once in a blue moon, hear about quality assurance and control in education. What role does your department play in the school system?

The major function of this department is registration, accreditation and evaluation of educational institutions within the purview of basic schools, senior secondary schools and vocational centres in FCT. This includes any special school that offers basic and secondary education.

There are basic requirements in setting up a school but the public school system is different from the private. Public agencies choose location based on their specification and set up schools but once the schools are established, we are responsible for monitoring and evaluating their academic variables and delivery as well as their infrastructure.

For the private schools, the proprietors have the duty to decide the location of their schools; but they should go to any of our zonal offices in FCT and purchase two documents; the guideline which tells you the basic things you need to do and the registration form. The next thing to do is to go to the Corporate Affairs Commission and register and then submit all the documents to us. The documents we need include the site plan, tenancy agreement in case of residential building, list of directors and staff and other registration documents.

There is no specific number of classrooms and teachers that a school should have because some start from the nursery school while others will start with primary 1. In each case, we know the number of subjects taught in each class and we know you must have a school head and teachers. However, after receiving all the registration documents, the first thing we do, is to go and inspect the location of the school which must meet minimum requirement; if it does, you get a full site approval and if it doesn’t, we tell you the things that are lacking and give you provisional approval, expecting that you will make some amendments.

Why do you have to assess the location of schools?

The guideline requires that schools should be located at least 500 meters away from certain structures such a major road junction, petrol station, cinema house, hotel, swamp and so on.  And if the rooms you are using are small based on the standard we have for classrooms, we will not give you approval. If it is school that requires a laboratory, you have to have one, so also a playground.

We also go for approval of commencement of academic activities after the site inspection and that is where if you are applying for a basic school, you will have nursery, primary and junior classes. You have to get the required teachers in each class and the National Curriculum and any other necessary document. We have to ascertain that teachers have the required qualification and are registered. In basic schools, the minimum qualification is NCE. Here we also do advisory evaluation such that if pupils move from primary 1 to 2, we assess whether or not they have increased in number.

Most private schools operate in residential apartments. Why?

In fairness, most of the private schools in FCT, start from residential buildings but they don’t get full approval and they must show evidence that they have a permanent site; we give them some years to develop the site after which they apply for extension.

Indeed, most of the schools in Abuja started from residential buildings but if the number of pupils is large, we don’t allow them to be in a small classroom. Again, schools in residential areas are not given full approval for two reasons; either the building is not configured as a school, until after adjustment by authorities or the land title in not educational, commercial or multi-purpose.

We don’t allow junior secondary schools to operate in residential areas because they need spacious labs and normal playground. In primary schools, you need a moderate playground.

We hardly see you closing schools these days. How often do you inspect schools?

We are supposed to inspect a school once in a term. Unfortunately, we don’t have enough manpower to do that effectively and fortunately, there are quality assurance units that look after public schools, so we concentrate on the private schools and take some part of the public and we try not to clash.

We have close to 1,400 registered private schools in FCT and we try to cover at least one school per session and everyday schools are opened. Between Mondays and Fridays of every school calendar, our evaluators go round schools.

The last time we closed a school based on infringements was two years ago because what we realized after the review of the exercise, was that most of the schools that are marked for closure could be processing their registration papers and some of the schools were located in environments where children won’t have any alternative if you close them down.

Also, the ability of this department to follow up on the closure is very weak; you close a school in the morning and by afternoon or evening it starts running lessons again. But those that are in bad condition, we try to close them down. At the end of the exercise, the schools that we feel, we could guide to improve on their structures; we encourage them to register. From experience, we realized that that it is better to engage these unregistered schools in a more productive way and many of them are willing to abide by regulations. We normally give them a deadline, for instance this year, by September, those schools that we have approached and refused to follow our guideline, shall be recommended for closure.

You said, you don’t close unregistered schools where children don’t have any alternative. Explain.

We believe that a school is serving social purpose of educating people, and the view of this department is that any structure used as a school must be delivering knowledge based on national standard. We expect that if there are public schools or better private schools in a location, parents would not take their children to shabby schools, though we have cases where there are public schools and parents take their children to bad private schools. When we close schools, we make provision for the pupils to be transferred to nearby schools as alternative bearing in mind that education policy says children should not trek long distances to school.

So, where we discovered that children could not get an alternative school in an area, we try not to close an unregistered school but we keep on encouraging them to improve. For example, in Baran Goni in Bwari Area Council, we have 10 private schools and only one public primary school, thus, we believe that if there are more public schools, the number of private schools will reduce. In Dutsen Alhaji, also in Bwari, we have 22 private schools and one public primary school, so the number of pupils cannot be accommodated in the public school. In Kubwa, there are 35 private schools and four public primary schools while in Dei-Dei, there are 20 private and one public school. In Tungan Maje in Gwagwalada Area Council, there are 54 private schools and one public primary school. If we have good public schools in these areas, we can conveniently close down shabby private schools.

Do you offer any support to public exam bodies?

This department has to recommend to exam bodies that a school has the required facilities to meet the conditions for presenting candidates for an exam. For basic schools for instance, once their students get to JSS2, they apply to us and we send our officials to inspect their  facilities before we send the report to the Education  Resource Centre for the basic exams start. For SSCE, both NECO and WAEC go to schools to confirm our reports before they approve exam centres for them. The only exam body that does not require our report is NABTEB; the report is done by a different body.

Some schools conduct common entrance exam. What is the benchmark?

What we know, based on the 6-3-3-4 system and later 9-3-4 system  (Universal Basic Education) is that there shouldn’t be any common entrance examination any longer; but automatic transition from primary to junior secondary school, determined by continuous assessment. And that is what operates in the FCT. Once a pupil completes primary 6, his name is taken to the FCT Universal Basic Education Board and given admission into JSS 1. In the case of unity schools, the National Examination Council (NECO) prepares entrance exam, to be able to select the best candidates.

Basic schools must have primary 1 to JSS3 classes while senior schools must have SSS1to SSS3 classes.