Address real issues, stop trivialising education policy

Presenting a proposal at a recent extraordinary meeting of the National Council on Education (NCE) held on February 6, 2025, Nigeria’s Minister of Education, Dr Tunji Alausa, advocated for the integration of secondary education into basic education; extending the existing 9-year compulsory education to 12 years. Alausa said this initiative aligns with global best practices and Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4), which aims to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education for all.

“Subsuming secondary education into basic education is necessary to improve access, retention and completion. By making secondary education a part of basic education, students will benefit from uninterrupted learning up to the age of 16,” Alausa maintained. He also explained that this reform shall reduce dropout rates by eliminating financial and systemic barriers that currently prevent students from completing secondary education.

A major feature of the proposal, he said, is the removal of the examination barrier between the Junior Secondary School (JSS) and the Senior Secondary School (SSS); allowing students to progress seamlessly without the need for external assessments in-between the two levels. Alausa explained that the goal is “to emulate global best practices seen in countries like the US, the UK, and Ghana, where 12 years of education are compulsory.”

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The minister said the proposal was only for discussion for the meantime, not an immediate policy shift; adding that the ministry will engage in extensive consultations with key stakeholders, including policymakers, state governments, teachers, parents, and others. He noted that a final decision on the matter shall be made at the NCE meeting in October 2025.

When the federal government adopted the Universal Basic Education (UBE) programme in 2006 to align the country’s education system with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), one of the policy thrusts of the programme as stated in Section 11(b) of the existing National Policy on Education (NPE) is “the provision of compulsory, free, and universal basic education for every Nigerian child of school age.” Basic education is a combination the education received during the 6 years of primary and 3 years of junior secondary education; making it an unbroken 9 years of schooling. This prompted the abolition of the common entrance examination; making it compulsory for every primary school graduate to proceed to JSS. Through the compulsory 9-year basic education policy, government intended to, as reiterated in Section 11(c) of the NPE, “reduce the incidence of drop-out from formal school system through improved relevance, quality and efficiency.”

One of the goals of the 9-year basic education as captured in section 13(a) is to “Provide the child with diverse basic knowledge and skills for entrepreneurship, wealth generation and educational advancement.” From the onset, the 9-year basic education policy envisaged that not all JSS graduates would qualify to proceed to the SSS level; the main reason why the curriculum of upper-basic classes is loaded with pre-vocational, trades and technology subjects including home economics, agricultural science, metal work, woodwork and electrical/electronics.

A summary of Alausa’s reasons for proposing 12-year compulsory schooling includes, (i) “increase access to education, retention, and completion,” (ii) “reduce dropout rates,” (iii) “improve the quality of education,” and (iv) “emulate global best practices, seen in countries like the US, the UK, and Ghana, where 12 years of education are compulsory.” The first three of the four reasons mentioned by Alausa are the same rationales expressed by government as basis for adopting the 9-year UBE almost two decades ago.

For obvious factors, the 9-year basic education policy has unfortunately failed to increase access of Nigerian school-age children to education. Neither has it been able to reduce dropout rate at the basic level as evidenced in the ever-growing statistics of Nigeria’s out-of-school children. If these are true reflections of today’s basic education in Nigeria, what then is the rationale for using the failures of the 9-year basic education programme as a reason for extending the compulsory education policy to the senior secondary level?

Enacting inconsequential policies such as making education compulsory or free up to the end of secondary education is unlikely to address any of the critical problems confronting education. The real challenges facing basic education are more about infrastructural deficit, gross under-funding, mismanagement of funds by educational administrators, obsolete laboratory equipment, and complete absence of relevant library and instructional materials. With these inadequacies, even the best education policy would fail.

The argument that 12-year compulsory schooling will improve the quality of education is not evidence-based and therefore remains a theory that can only be clarified, for now, by Dr Alausa. Similarly, importing a foreign education policy simply because it has worked in the US or UK for adoption in Nigeria where the social, cultural and economic settings are significantly different will not only produce a misleading outcome but also cause confusion within the sector.

While the Daily Trust urges Dr Alausa to stop trivialising education policies and go beyond window dressing solutions, we encourage him to first understand the real issues affecting this level of education before attempting to address them. Make the 9-year basic education work before making a case for 12-year compulsory schooling.