N120m disbursed to states for teacher devt in 2016 —UBEC

THE executive secretary of the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC), Dr Hamid Bobboyi, has disclosed that about N120 million was disbursed to state governments for training of teachers in 2016.  Bobboyi said the fund was released to the States Universal Basic Education Boards (SUBEBS) under the Teacher Professional Development Project of the commission.

He said this was part of the efforts of the current administration to improve on quality of teachers in schools across the country.

He disclosed that in addition to the matching grant to state governments, UBEC provides other funding support to the state governments in terms of teacher professional development, support for special education and provisional instructional materials to boost teaching and learning in schools.

Bobboyi said: “We have the teacher professional development project. This is a very important project to us. For last year, 2016, we gave every state N120 million for Teacher Professional Development.

“We have increased the monitoring of this particular project to ensure that teachers are properly trained because of the importance the administration attaches to improving on the quality of teachers.

“Inclusive education is another area we focused on in the last one year. We have redesigned the programme. We are working with the states on how to take care of those who are challenged one way or the other – hearing impairment, sight impairment, those who have problems in movement or whatever challenge.

“We are trying to ensure that provision of basic education includes all those who are also disadvantage in one particular area or the other. What we are doing is that if you are a private provider of education to these groups of people, you must provide concrete proposal to us.

“It is not enough for you to come to us that I’m doing this and doing that and funds are given to you. We ensure that we monitor the proposals, assess them just to ensure that money from UBEC for inclusive education is being spent judiciously.”

The executive secretary said the commission is also experimenting with a new programme, in which it conducts early detection of sight problems.

“We check children who have sight problems. We discovered that some children with sight problems go to classrooms but are unable to concentrate,” he stated.

“We are moving around the schools to ensure that we detect these problems very early, instead of allowing it to hinder their education,” he said.