‘Our vision is to develop high level manpower through qualitative education’

Offiong Offiong

Worried by the declining standard of education in the country, the Cross River state government has begun a revolution to develop qualitative education system in the state. OFFIONG OFFIONG, commissioner for education in this interview with AMAECHI OKONKWO, explains how.

Policy on National Examination Council (NECO)
The issue you have raised is one we will really appreciate your assistance by way of informing the public well about government policy. The issue of NECO cannot be taken in isolation. I will try to give you a brief on the position of government as far as education is concerned in Cross River state. The state is erroneously being projected as educationally disadvantaged, measured in terms of how many graduates or the level of manpower we have in the state.
But we all will agree that manpower is not measured in terms of numbers but in terms of quality and Cross River state has adopted an education policy that ensures that we have quality education so that we will be able to produce quality and high level manpower. We want to be able to produce graduates from our secondary schools who will have unhindered access to tertiary education anywhere in the world and in so doing the government came out with quality control and quality assurance policy.
We stopped mass promotion both at primary and secondary levels. You must write an exam and on the completion of your present class you can then be promoted to another class. Cross River state is the first state to stop mass promotion.
In an attempt to further sharpen the intellect of our students for external examinations, we also set a ceiling for those to be promoted to junior secondary school by passing what is then referred to as the state common entrance and promotion examination to secondary school, which you know is being controlled from here in the ministry.
So, it is not enough for anybody to tell us that they have finished primary school, we have to conduct exam to certify that those who are seeking admission into secondary school have met certain standards. Also at the level of transition from the junior secondary school to senior secondary school we in the ministry conduct the junior secondary school examination to ensure that we have good standards and that they are sustained.
And it is upon the completion of the junior secondary school by our own standard that we now place the student in the senior secondary. Now the next control is at the level of SSCE 2 mock exams. You know that the failure rate in Cross River state has been very high. The present pass rate is 27 percent and that rose from 5 percent in 2000 to 27 percent as of 2007 and we are talking about those who have Maths, English and three other subjects, that is five credit pass including maths and English. So what we have as at 2007 is 27 percent and this quality control government set up in 2000 has been able to make us to move from 5 percent pass to 27 percent as of 2007.
You can see that it is a slow advancement and that therefore means that there is need to further tighten our control to enable us to meet our target. Our target by 2011 is to achieve 70-75 percent pass in external examinations. And we are not going to use NECO because it is widely claimed to be cheap compared to WAEC. So we have put our standard based on the WAEC benchmark and in order for us to sustain that standard, we said you can take your NECO as an external candidate but in our public schools it is only WAEC we recognize so that we will be able to sustain and maintain the WAEC standard. We are not saying that you cannot take NECO because we did not ban NECO in Cross River state. NECO will continue to administer exams and those in public schools who may wish to take NECO should register as private candidates, but not through our schools because in our schools we have set the benchmark, which is WAEC standard. And we also believe in doing so such that everybody will be fully equipped towards attaining this standard. That is why I said we don’t treat this NECO thing in isolation. As you are aware, we have been having yearly retraining for our teachers, December last year we trained both secondary and primary school teachers and we are going to sustain that also throughout the life of this administration.
We are also going to embark on comprehensive renovation of our schools, both secondary and primary, so that we will be able to provide and sustain a conducive environment for our children. What Cross River state is seeking to achieve is qualitative education and we also want our students to be examined in a manner that will equip them with the kind of education to be able to compete with other Nigerians anywhere whether in renowned private schools or any secondary school in the world. And we believe that it is only WAEC for now that can guarantee us that kind of standard examination.
The clamour about NECO is not based on anything else except that people want a substitute for WAEC. But you cannot be talking about a substitute when the substitute is generally seen as a cheaper substitute. We don’t want that but rather since most of us even most of us sitting here passed through the school system when WAEC was the only examination and you will agree with me that many of us did well in WAEC and everybody was motivated, everybody was focused towards the WAEC standard but if you have another opportunity where people now say instead of going to get three Fs in WAEC you can have two credits in NECO will defeat the whole purpose of our quality control and quality assurance in the state. And that is why we have said you can write your NECO as an external candidate but not in our public schools. In our public schools it is WAEC because we are working in line with WAEC standard. If in the future we find out that WAEC is being bastardized like NECO, government then will consider reviewing the present position. But I don’t think there is any complaint about WAEC in terms of its ability to sustain standards.
In addition to this, we have also set up a state monitoring committee on exam malpractices because you know that is another cankerworm that is really affecting the quality of education in our state and the government is going to confront this with all sense of seriousness. We cannot be talking about quality and at the same time treat the issue of exam malpractice with kids’ glove. We have set up a committee at the state level, we intend to set up committees at local government level and we intend to pursue this matter with the aim of eliminating exam malpractices in our institutions. So that is an overview of our quality control and quality assurance policy as it affects education in general and I think that is why NECO has become an issue.

Yardstick for measurement
The yardstick is that there are many of our students who have had fantastic results at NECO but cannot defend the result. I am coming from the university system where you find that a lot of people have been asked to withdraw from the university for the fact that they cannot cope with the university education and the bulk of these people have NECO results. You also notice that there is a general feeling, rightly or wrongly, that NECO is cheaper and that can affect hard work among our students so that they now see it as an easy way out.
And what we are trying to discourage is the kind of laxity among teachers and laziness among students. We are trying to encourage hard work for our students and our teachers and we believe that if we say that this is the only exam you must write and they know that they don’t have substitute everybody will work towards achieving that standard through hard work and support of government because we all need to acknowledge the fact that in all these things we are talking without the support of the government little can be achieved.
And on the part of this present administration, under Senator Liyel Imoke, we have made it clear about his mission towards the transformation of education and you will agree with me that in the budget of the state, education has the highest budgetary allocation. That is a manifestation of the commitment the present administration has for education. We want to see that if we are able to have one hundred of our graduates coming out from secondary school we want to see that these are quality graduates because it is better to have few quality graduates, they are the ones who will be able to steer the ship of leadership, economic and technological growth rather than have one thousand graduates who will be dependent on other people to drive them. That is the vision of the state as far as education is concerned and it is based on this vision that we believe we should use WAEC as a benchmark.
Let me say that the reasons which I have given may appear not to be strong enough to some people, but it is real. We don’t have control over the processing of exams by NECO, we also don’t have control over the processing of exams by WAEC but we know that if you put the two side by side we have more confidence in the management and processing of exams by WAEC than NECO. It is not a matter that is dependent on the syllabuses of the people you are using. If you have wrong machinery you can still use the same people to run both wrong and proper machineries. When you are using the proper machinery it gives you a good result, if you use good people to run wrong machinery the result obviously cannot be good. There is more to it which may be better addressed by the federal government. For instance, in terms of administrative structure and other set up, the entire structure in NECO, the syllabus may appear to be the same but you should also remember that these are two different autonomous examination bodies. So, you really cannot say they are the same thing, they may appear to be the same but we are more confident in terms of the processing and conduct of exams by WAEC. The state believes that a lot of work still needs to be done for NECO to reach the standard that WAEC has attained for now.
Migration of candidates
Now in terms of migration to rural schools, we have observed this and that is why we talked about monitoring exam malpractice because if we are talking about quality we cannot maintain any quality if we allow exam malpractice to continue in our state. Now, I have put a number of control on this; first and foremost you must register people in WAEC, those who have passed mock, whether your school is private or public, they must do our mock. Now, we also know that there are schools in the rural areas which don’t even have the accommodation to teach 200-300 students but during examinations they register 200, 300 for only exam classes. We have told WAEC you cannot and this has also been taken up at the level of National Council on Education. You cannot register more than the carrying capacity of the school and the class you are registering. If the class has about 50 SS3 students you have accommodation for 50 SS3 you cannot register more than 50, that is the carrying capacity for that class in that school.
So we are going to check this and we have started. Many of the private schools this time have come here to collect clearance and we will use our list of their mock performance and also the approval we have given from the ministry in terms of their carrying capacity.
If your carrying capacity is 50 and you are presenting us a list of 100 we turn it down.
And that, we believe, will check the problem of migration to rural areas. Now, there is also the other problem of migration to neighbouring states. One of our neighbouring states, Benue, has already adopted the Cross River state standard that you must pass mock for you to be registered for WAEC or NECO and we are also discussing with Akwa-Ibom state government, because it is now a national policy for them to key in there. With these in place, the students and their guardians will know there is no easy way out. We have to re-inculcate the culture of hard work and seriousness in our students. And that is what our own policy is seeking to achieve, hard work for us to achieve success in school.
Frankly speaking, this is not punitive, it is not about making things difficult for people. You will agree with me for those of us who are scholars of history how some of the emerging Asian giants in technology have made it, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, we don’t even go to the gurus like China and India. These things were not achieved by some substandard education. We, as a state, must set a standard and everybody must move to attain that standard. It is not about punishing or discouraging people, it is about establishing a sustainable direction of growth which must be technologically biased because Cross River state has already branded itself as a unique state among others and we cannot with all the tourism, with all the technology we are trying to showcase just fold our arms and allow our education to follow the trend of popular majority. Then it will appear we don’t have a vision as a state. Our vision is to be able to develop high level manpower through qualitative education from primary to secondary and to every other higher level.
Inspection and monitoring
We have an inspectorate division that has been working, but just like every other system it is also plagued with some challenges which the present administration is also addressing. Challenges in terms of adequate mobility, challenge in terms of adequate capacity and manpower in some subject areas which we are also trying to address. Above all, the vastness of our state also constitutes a very major challenge to us and in addressing this, we have classified our inspectorate unit to state, zonal and local government levels. At the local government and zonal levels we have inspectors and then here at the headquarters we also have inspectors and we have been doing a lot of monitoring. We constantly get feed back from principals on all our policies. We meet with them at least twice every term to enable us have first hand information from those of them in the field. We also have extended this meeting to our head teachers in the primary schools. For the first time in the history of our state, the commissioner has constantly been meeting with head teachers. We interact and hear from them their challenges and at the level of the state we know how to address these challenges.