No fewer than 79 schools in Misau Local Government Area of Bauchi State have only one teacher each teaching all subjects, The PUNCH has learned.
The Director, School Services, Bauchi State Universal Basic Education Board, Korijo Usman, disclosed this while answering questions from journalists during a media dialogue organized by the United Nations Children Fund on the enrollment drive of out-of-school children in Misau and Alkaleri LGAs.
Speaking at the Central Primary School, Misau LGA, Usman said that many schools in the LGA and across the state have inadequate teachers to teach pupils.
“In Misau, there are 79 schools that have only one teacher each while there are zero schools with no teacher. All the schools have teachers except that they are not adequate.
“Misau is even better compared to others. Go to some other schools and see the situation there. So, what we do is to find out where they are congested and we ask them to redeploy and post them to other places. And that is what we told them from SUBEB that if they see a school with many teachers, they should move to two or three other schools depending on the number there.
“Here in this school (Misau Central Primary School), they have 1,726 pupils with 24 teachers. If you do the calculation you’ll see that the minimum standard of teacher and pupil ratio is 45 and you’ll find out that we don’t have it in Nigeria. In this school, there is a ratio of 72 teachers per class.
“If you go to the Bauchi metropolis, you’ll see that there are classes with even 150 or 200, even 220 and 250 pupils with only a teacher. So their own here is even better because you can see that they have 72 per class, theirs is better compared to Bauchi Local Government Area.
“There are other schools that have not even up to 1,000 pupils but they have over 30 teachers and most of them are women,” he said.
Speaking earlier, the Education Secretary, Misau Local Government Education Authority, Alhaji Abdu, when asked about the inadequate number of teachers in the school, he said that the situation at Misau Central Primary School is better than many schools in the LGA.
He said “The teachers we have here in this school, we manage them like that. I can tell you that this school is one of the schools that have many teachers, we have some schools that have over 600 pupils with just seven teachers. I tell you that if you go to some schools, you’ll be very surprised. In this school, we have enough teachers compared to many others here in Misau Local Government Area. What we do is to collaborate with the SBMC to see that we have volunteers.”
When Umar was asked what they are doing to address this adequate manpower in the school and others across the state, the Director of School Services, Korijo Umar, said that “SUBEB does not employ teachers.”
“What we do is to only post teachers to schools. The Teachers Service Commission is saddled with the responsibility of employing teachers in collaboration with SUBEB. We, SUBEB, act as supervisors. After that (teachers’ employment), they post the names to us and we then verify them.
“When they give us the names, we will verify them to see those who jumped through the window, maybe the certificate is not correct, or it is not his certificate or other reasons. We then remove those names and tell them to replace the names with other employees,” he added.
Meanwhile, a total of 37 pupils, made up of 20 males and 17 females, who were out-of-school were enrolled at the Central Primary School, Misau, following the introduction of a new system called “Teaching at the Right Level” by SUBEB and UNICEF.
