What we are doing to secure our children in schools nationwide —Alausa

Since his appointment as the Minister of Education, Dr Tunji Alausa has left no one in doubt about his determination to address the structural imbalance that has stunted the growth of the nation’s education sector. One of the instances of his remarkable interventions is the deft manner in which he handled the university admission-age controversy and the numerous reforms in the sector. Alausa spoke with select editors on how his ministry is handling the shortage of schoolteachers, bandit attacks on schools, among other issues.

What concrete steps is the Ministry of Education taking to strengthen technical education in Nigeria?

We have signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Singapore government on the training of vocational teachers in the country, specifically for the Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) programme. Singapore has one of the best vocational training systems in the world, and we are going to take full advantage of that partnership. They will train approximately 250 of our technical school teachers, who will then cascade that knowledge downwards. We are also doing leadership training in technical education, where heads of our polytechnics and principals of technical institutions will be trained abroad and come back to train other teachers. This is a deliberate effort to build a new generation of technically competent educators at every level. As part of our push in technical education, this year we are also investing about N200 billion of TETFUND funds in upgrading infrastructure in our universities and polytechnics. Technological universities and conventional universities with faculties of engineering will have new workshops fully equipped with modern tools and equipment. Those that do not have engineering or technology workshops at all will have new ones built. We have allocated N1 billion for each of these universities.

On the polytechnic side, each polytechnic will receive a substantial capital injection — I think N1 billion or so — to carry out a NEEDS analysis: what do you have now, what do you need, and how do we close that gap? We want to invest where it counts, so we get the most value out of every naira spent. That is the same model we used with medical school intervention. In 2025, we gave about 18 medical schools — three from each geopolitical zone —about N6 billion in total; N4 billion for rehabilitation and improvement of facilities for them to double their admissions in Medicine, Pharmacy, Nursing, and Dentistry. That has been a phenomenal success. Because we have increased admissions, we have also invested N1.5 billion into these schools to build hostels to accommodate the new intakes.

With so many cases of abductions in secondary schools across the country, what are you doing to forestall future incidents?

Our alert system is very poor. When kidnappers come for these children, they arrive with hundreds of motorcycles, and kidnap hundreds of children. It is not like they bring helicopters. Where is our response system? Where is the alarm system? That is what we are working to change. For each school, we are deploying a technology-based surveillance system that will include motion sensors. If anyone crosses a designated perimeter, an alarm is triggered; it goes immediately to a local command centre, and a response is activated. We are working with the office of the National Security Adviser on this. We are calling it a full-spectrum school security initiative. In the past, school safety was handled through fragmented financing arrangements. Now, we have created a dedicated department of school safety within the ministry. We are also working towards having a dedicated funding stream specifically for the school safety department. This is a structural change, not just a response to incidents.

What is the Ministry of Education doing to build capacity for teachers?

The University of Lagos and the University of Birmingham have just signed a Memorandum of Understanding. Under this arrangement, our lecturers will be trained and upskilled through a structured collaboration. The areas we are focusing on are data science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, engineering, and others where we know we have technical gaps.

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The initial phase will be piloted, and other universities will follow. Look at Egypt today, they have almost 50 universities with foreign university partnerships. We are moving in that direction. We need to open up our universities to international partnerships. We have also worked with the Nigeria Union of Teachers (NUT) to reward the best teachers. We recently rewarded the best teacher in the country with a cash prize of N50 million

What is the current state of the Federal Government’s relationship with the academic and non-academic unions of tertiary institutions?

Have you seen ASUU, ASUP, COEASU — the College of Education Academic Staff Union — or any of the academic unions complaining? No. Have the non-academic unions — SSANU, NASU, NATS — complained? No, they won’t. I will tell you why. I met with all of them. What happened, why the government got into trouble in the past, there was a convoluted process. In the Ministry of Education, we had multiple separate committees, each dealing with a different union — one for ASUU, one for NASU, one for ASUP, one for COEASU, one for SSANU. That structure produced nothing but confusion and delays. We came in and said this cannot work. We told ASUU and others that we will fix this thing. We changed the approach. We brought all the unions together and I told them, “Whatever you need, come and speak to me.” No roadblock; it’s me and you. That is why things got fixed. A lot of credit goes to this President (President Bola Tinubu). You, come to me and tell me whatever you need and I’ll take it to the President and he’ll attend to my request. We now have one person — with full institutional knowledge of both the academic and non-academic unions — coordinating all of this. All these unions, 80% of their needs are the same, only 20% is peculiar. I recently met with the polytechnic union, ASUP, and our agreement with them is almost complete and we’ll soon sign it. We are also working with SSANU to get an agreement worked out because we don’t want too much arrears.

We also have to maintain what they call the parity ratio between academic and non-academic staff salaries. We don’t want to cause another problem. We’ve raised the academic staff salaries by 40% now because they were an existing priority. The parity is relatively close at entry level, but as academics advance — from Assistant Lecturer to Senior Lecturer and beyond — the gap widens. We have to model the entire salary percentage along that entire arc before we can adjust the non-academic side without creating new distortions. We have told the non-academic unions to be patient, and they understand that the work is nearly done.

On sustainability, it must be sustainable. I told the unions from the beginning, please, let us be realistic. This President has promised to help you, but it must be something we can afford. This government cannot agree to something that will collapse the system in two years. Whatever we commit to must be something we can afford to sustain. When the President was comfortable with the agreed numbers, he agreed and signed off on them. We said that salary will start effectively from January 1st and it has started. Go and ask. You can go and verify that. These things took 20 years to resolve, but now we have resolved them in a sustainable manner for the future.

What informed the Ministry of Education’s recent move to change subject criteria for university admission?

Why is it that a student who wants to study Law must have Mathematics as part of their five credits? If you are going to study the Social Sciences, we have removed Mathematics as a compulsory cut-off. Similarly, if you want to study Engineering, you should not be failed out because you did not score high enough in English. We removed that barrier too. This matters because if we do not increase supply — both in public and private institutions — we will kill the private university sector. We are also expanding entry requirements for polytechnics. Four credits, that is the threshold. These kids want to go to school. We need to create those opportunities. Look, when these kids go to school, by the time they get two years of ND, four years of BSc, their brain matter would have developed more rather than leaving them on the street. When I got to America and started working as a resident, I saw BSc holders working as drivers. I said, “Ah, BSc working as a driver?” That is a developed society. But we think that once you go to university, you have to be a manager. Degree just gives you better education to be able to make well-informed decisions as you migrate in your life. We have to get to that point as well, where everybody should be educated not for you to get a job, to go and become permanent secretary, but to gain relevant knowledge to make life-changing decisions.

What are you doing to resolve the longstanding HND and BSc dichotomy?

The Speaker of the House of Representatives (Tajudeen Abbas) and I have a bill that is nearly finalised. We just need to make a few more legislative changes. Polytechnics now will be able to award of Bachelor of Technology. Once this leaves the House and go to the Senate, we will push it to the President

Some colleges of education can now award both a National Certificate in Education and Bachelor of Education degree. All regular Colleges of Education were directed to domesticate this by 2025, and we are migrating the curriculum to full implementation in 2026. We want to do the same for polytechnics — awarding a Bachelor of Technology degree. But we are being careful: the Bachelor of Technology must be grounded in engineering and technology. If you are at a polytechnic doing accounting, you get an HND. We are not just rebranding existing programmes; we are aligning the qualification with genuine technical competence.

State governors hardly recruit primary and secondary school teachers. What do you think is behind this situation or are they afraid of recurrent expenditure?

You see, the coordination with subnational governments, we do this well. At the Federal Ministry of Education, our job is really to coordinate policies of subnational governments. And we’ve done it so well. Now, with what you said about recruitment of teachers, I’ve gone to them as well. As minister, I have written letters to governors in respect of this issue and they read those letters. Today, when we look at demand and supply, we have enough registered teachers. Colleges of Education are there, universities of education, and faculties of education of universities are producing enough. But we don’t have enough uptake for these teachers. Private secondary schools just take unqualified teachers because of cost. They pay them N30,000 or N40,000 Naira per month, which is criminal. Now, I’ve written to the governors that you need to hire more teachers. Enugu State governor (Peter Mbah) called me and said, “Oh, Minister, I got your letter, I’ve just given approval to hire 2,000 teachers.” Today, the states are awash with money; this is the first time in the history of our country. Federal Government is totally broke; states have more money. Because of the deregulated money from removal of fuel subsidy and stopping this foreign exchange subsidy, a lot of money is coming to the states. So, they shouldn’t have any problem hiring teachers and nurses. It’s not about being afraid of recurrent. No, they have enough money to do that. But I’ve written to them and I can tell you a few days ago, Enugu governor called me and said, “I’ve hired 2,000 teachers. I’m building smart schools.”

What efforts have you made to fix the out-of-school children crisis? How are you addressing the Almajiri problem in the North and convincing parents to enroll their children in formal schools?

Depending on who you ask, the figures range from 13.5 million to 21 million out-of-school children. My own working estimate is around 15 million. But I will be honest, these are all abbreviated numbers. A lot of these figures come from international organisations like UNESCO, and their incentive structure does not always align with ours. So we are taking our destiny into our own hands. We have begun a community-by-community data collection exercise. We are geotagging locations, capturing biometric data, and working with the National Identity Management Commission to enrich the dataset. We are currently in seven states, and we have already identified around 700,000 out-of-school children. Some South-Eastern states are proving harder to map. My own estimate is that once we complete the exercise, the verified number will be significantly lower than what is currently reported, but even at 10 million, the problem remains enormous.

What are we doing about it? Ninety per cent of the reason children are not in school is financial. So we are deploying conditional cash transfers — essentially vouchers — to enable families to send their children to school and have the cost covered. We are also restarting school feeding, but in a smarter way. Rather than a top-down procurement model where contracts are given out and food is cooked centrally, we are moving to a local model: families in the community, particularly mothers, will be given the means to provide food for their own schools. They will know the children, the community will have ownership, and cash will circulate locally rather than disappearing into the pockets of contractors. I’ve spoken to the President about that, taking the School Feeding Programme away from the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs and bringing it to the Ministry of Education.

On the Almajiri question and convincing northern Muslim communities to enroll their children in formal schools, I want to be clear that this is a national challenge, not just a northern one. Financial barriers are the primary driver. When you provide the incentive — food, cash transfers, a welcoming environment — families respond. We are not trying to override anyone’s values; we are removing the economic obstacles that prevent children from getting the education they deserve.