The Lagos State Commissioner for Education, Mrs. Folashade Adefisayo, has showcased the achievements and impacts of Excellence in Child Education and Learning (EKOEXCEL) at two international conferences in America.
EKOEXCEL is a transformational initiative of Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu launched in 2019 to improve public primary schools through technology deployment. It has since recorded tangible gains among teachers and pupils.
The initiative overseen by the Lagos State Universal Education Board (LASUBEB) has also helped reduce the number of out-of-school children in the state, among other empirically verified achievements by international scholars.
At the Brooking’s Institute Education Systems Transformation Symposium themed: “Collaborative Work, Local Contexts, and False Dichotomies” on February 17, Adefisayo highlighted how the Sanwo-Olu administration has been addressing issues bedeviling the state’s education sector.
The commissioner, who titled her presentation “Education Systems Transformation: The Lagos Story,” recounted the challenges the government met on the ground and how it solved them.
She disclosed that the state has more children in private schools with 18,000 private schools compared to 1,017 public primary schools. The state also has 698 public junior and senior secondary schools and five public technical colleges.
Highlighting the government’s initial challenges, Adefisayo said: “We had a high attrition rate because many of the students enroll but then see a form of hopelessness and go into informal training by learning to be a carpenter or hairdresser. We also have a significant out-of-school population due to the heavy migration to Lagos from other parts of the country by parents who don’t enroll their children.
“We had low numeracy and literacy skills among the students, with some spending six years in our system unable to read; it was quite scandalous, I felt. We also have a national challenge with security and the high cost of building schools because Lagos is waterlogged.”
Adefisayo said that because Sanwo-Olu made education one of the critical focuses of his administration, there have been improvements with enrolment rising in primary schools, improved learning rate, and 40 per cent growth in literacy and literacy, 80 per cent success rate in terminal exams after SS3.
She attributed the successes in Lagos’ education sector to the introduction of EKOEXCEL, which has boosted the numeracy and literacy skills of pupils in primary schools, teacher training, also a critical part of EKOEXCEL, renovation, building and furnishing of classrooms, curriculum revision and leveraging the involvement of private partners.
