The National Senior Secondary Education Commission (NSSEC) is to construct local technical institutes across the country to enable youths acquire relevant skills for national development.
The Executive Secretary of the commission, Dr Iyela Ajayi made this known in Abuja on Wednesday at the commission’s maiden news conference on repositioning senior secondary education in the country.
Ajayi explained that the construction of the institutes was necessary owing to the state of workshops in technical schools across the country.
“The state of workshops in our technical schools is an area we are going to look into next year.
“Senior secondary school is important in the area of skills acquisition. It is at this level that our students are expected to develop skills.
“If you go through the curriculum of senior secondary education, we have about 34 trades but we know that in majority of our schools the workshops are not there and the ones that are on ground are not equipped.
“Some of them are not well staff, so we intend to intervene in that area from next year,” he said.
Speaking on funding the senior secondary schools, Ajayi explained that the major source of funding to ease the burden of senior secondary education was two per cent of the Consolidated Revenue Fund (CRF).
He said that though the commission had not received any funding since inception of its two years of existence, appealed to the Federal Government to ensure speedy release of the fund in 2024.
He added that the commission had met most state governors for the establishment of the senior secondary board in the various states to ease implementation of the funding, saying the governors were willing to bring their counterparts funding to address challenges of senior secondary education.
He said that over 80 per cent of the 5.2 million senior secondary schools in the country were not under the control of the commission, hence the need to partner state governors to give the schools a facelift.
According to him, we cannot succeed if we don’t get the buying of state governors to take senior secondary schools to the next level.
He, therefore, said that the commission had prepared a document on guidelines for accessing, disbursing and utilising the FGN/NSSEC intervention fund for transparency and accountability.
“We know that decay in secondary education which has led to inadequate facilities, inadequate in the number of teachers in terms of quality and quantity is much and that is the fact, this is why this commission is set up to address the problems of senior secondary education.
“We are calling on the government to please release the two per cent of the Consolidated Revenue Fund (CRF) so that we can start the work.
“We have engaged with state governors and they are waiting for us to put in their counterparts funding for the development of senior secondary education,” he said.
When asked if the two per cent would be able to meet the demands of senior secondary education with the dwindling economy situation, he said “we must start from somewhere.
“Government has competing demands, we cannot ask the government to give us all the money.
”If government is giving us 10 per cent for example, what will happen to health, road, and other areas crying for government interventions.
”What we want government to do is to give us this two per cent and may be later on when the economy is good we can now demand for more,” he said. (NAN)
