SINCE the Oyo State government adopted pre-primary school education programme a few years ago, the State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB) has engaged workers in a series of capacity building programmes to ensure quality assurance.
This necessitated the recent two-day workshop organised for local government Universal Basic Education secretaries and quality assurance officers by the board, in conjunction with the United Nations International Children’s Education Fund (UNICEF), on monitoring and mentoring strategies for enhancing quality assurance in pre-primary education, held at the Kankanfo Inn, Ibadan, Oyo State.
The executive chairman of the board, Mrs Aderonke Makanjuola, while addressing participants from all the 33 local government areas in the state, said the training exercise was meant to initiate fundamental reforms process that would revolutionise classroom practice, especially in pre-primary classes and ultimately raise the quality of curriculum delivery in Oyo State basic education.
According to her, the development will go a long way to reduce social and economic inequalities and also help to reduce out-of-school children phenomenon peculiar to public school system in the country.
Makanjuola, who was represented by Elder Delani Binuyo, Director, School Services, declared that to achieve quality assurance in early childhood care, there is a need for intensive monitoring and mentoring in schools.
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This he said would engender promotion of child-friendly schooling that will, in turn, enhance improved environment, retention, completion and enhanced learning achievement rate.
The executive secretary of the board, Mr Olusanjo Adeniyi, noted that the quest for qualitative knowledge is a continuous process.
Director, Department of Social Mobilisation, Information, Communication Technology in the board, Mrs Aderonke Ogunsina, said the capacity building workshop is inevitable, and that every child on the street deserves to be educated.
According to her, the board had trained and retrained pre-primary school teachers on the use of Reggio Emilla method of educating children and felt the need to intimate all the state’s education secretaries and quality assurance officers with the new teaching method.
UNICEF’s Education Specialist, B Field Office, Akure, Muritala Muhammed, commended the Oyo State government for its readiness to develop its pre-primary education programme and for its determination to bring out-of-school children back to school.
He said it is the expectation of UNICEF that the government would replicate all the educational supportive programmes of the Fund in its four pilot local governments in the state.
According to him, UNICEF has developed series of models for effective teaching, mentoring and monitoring in the pre-primary and primary school education for state governments to adopt, and urged the state government to commit more funds to monitoring and quality assurance to ensure quality delivery.
Some of the participants who spoke with Tribune Education described the workshop as a welcome development in the history of early childhood education advancement in Oyo State.
Chairman, Forum of Education Secretaries in Oyo State, Mr Ajagbe Kolawole, described the workshop as timely and assured UNICEF and Oyo SUBEB that the knowledge gained during the workshop would be put to use aptly.
Similarly, Mr Sunday Opadoja from Ibarapa East and his counterpart, Mr Abiodun Akinyemi from Ona-Ara local government areas in the state commended the efforts of the state government.
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