Borno State Governor, Babagana Umara Zulum has spoken out against the poor quality of primary and secondary school education in the state. He stated that majority of secondary school leavers in the state are unqualified for University admission.
The Governor who held a meeting with 84 principals in the state at the Multipurpose Hall of the Government House in Maiduguri, the state capital on Sunday, October 11, attributed this inadequacy to the poor quality of education being received from primary and secondary schools in the state.
He added that high school leavers in the state who get admitted into tertiary institutions still struggle to keep up with their academics as a result of the substandard education they have received while growing up.
In his words, “Education is the bedrock of any development. Without functional educational system, we shall continue to experience this Boko Haram insurgency in Borno.
“Look at the kind of students we are graduating from our public secondary schools, most of them do not qualify for admission into universities, even those who get admitted find it very difficult to cope.
“There is a general decline in the standard of education in public institutions all over the country. There is the lack of qualified teachers, inadequate teaching facilities, poor maintenance culture, general decay of infrastructure, Government’s inability to ensure monitoring and evaluation, centralised control by the ministry, unnecessary bureaucracy, and irregular training and retraining of teachers and other essential staff. There is poor data management and indiscipline amongst the major problems affecting the public school system.”
The Governor, therefore, appealed to the school administrators to open up on the challenges confronting the performance of students. He further directed the immediate reintroduction of the common entrance examination for primary six pupils, while insisting that only pupils who pass the examination by securing a cut-off mark, should be eligible for admission into the first year of junior secondary schools.
Reacting to this, the principals attributed the poor academic performance in the state to the faulty foundations of most school leavers.