Strategies for Improving Early Childhood Education at the University of Lagos
Chapter One
Objective of the study
The main objective of this study is to examine the strategies for improving the early childhood education program at the University of Lagos. Specifically, the study aims to:
- determine the percentage of childhood education departments in UNILAG that have the physical resources (buildings, playgrounds, and furniture) as stipulated by NERDC
- determine the percentage of early childhood education departments in UNILAG that have human resources (teaching and non-teaching) that meet the criteria stipulated by NERDC
- determine the percentage of early childhood education departments in UNILAG that have learning resources (toys, print, technology, local) that meet the criteria stipulated by NERDC
Chapter Two
Review of the Related Literature
Introduction
The years before a child reaches kindergarten are among the most critical in his or her life to influence learning (ED.gov, 2010); and this becomes a challenge and commitments to the parents, teachers, community and government, to ensure that these young children receive appropriate training in their early stages of life. Early childhood education programmes are highly recognized and promoted in developed societies to give children the opportunity to learn phenomenal amount of experiences at home and surrounding environments. Heward (2009) explained in this scenario that children grow and develop in orderly ways, learning to move about their world, communicate, and play. As their ability to manipulate their environment increases, so does their level of independence.
Nigeria is currently facing a challenging time in providing g her young citizens’ quality education. Some important issues facing Nigeria’s policy makers include ineffective planning and implementation of programmes, accountability, and management of scarce resources, shortage of highly qualified early childhood teachers, undefined curriculum and inclusion. In agreement with the above, Mindes (2007) added that early childhood educators’ challenges are enormous and they include parent partnership, respect for cultural diversity, appropriate early intervention assessment, and linking curriculum and assessment practices appropriately. In the World Summit in 2001, the Secretary General of the United Nations reaffirmed the world’s commitment to ensuring that every child has a right to the best possible start in life. He identified good quality education, opportunities to develop his or her full potential, and an enabling environment to make positive contribution to the society in meaningful ways as the thematic areas.
On the contrary, the recently released results of the Senior Secondary School Examinations in Nigeria would continue if stakeholders do not tackle the challenges facing the sector. Ademilola in TELL (2010) reported that the performance of students in West African Examination Council (WAEC) and NECO examinations has not been impressive in recent times. In the last 2009 NECO/GCE, only 1.8 percent of the 236, 613 that sat for the examinations across 1,708 centers in the country had five credit passes, Mathematics and English inclusive. Whilst out of the 1,373,009 candidates that took the Senior Secondary Certificate Examinations, 25.99 percent of them had five credit passes in five subjects, Mathematics, and English inclusive. This dismal performance was also observed in May/June 2009 NECO results.
Ademilola stated emphatically that at the fore of these challenges facing the educational sector in Nigeria is the poor quality of teachers. In his own right, Peter Okebukola, former executive secretary of National Universities Commission (NUC), in a report by the Daily Sun newspaper said many teachers are exceedingly weak in the subjects they teach. Besides, he further argued that very little is done to train and retrain teachers in the country and this takes its toll on the performances of teachers. This training gap creates vicious cycles that negate the necessary early childhood educational foundations, and inevitably later education.
The importance of teachers and the roles they play in any educational system cannot be over-emphasized. Teachers are usually linked to issues related to teaching-learning goals, learning achievement, organization of programmes, and the performance of the educational system which involves an analysis of the role of teachers their behaviours, performance, remuneration, incentives, skills and how they are used by the system (Federal Ministry of Education and Youth Development, 1994). The National Policy on Education (1981), in recognition of the importance of teacher quality, states, “No education system can rise above the quality of its teacher”. It is a shared view that the quality of any education system depends largely on the competence, commitment and motivation of the teachers (Mbanefoh, 2002). In the same vein, the 1993 summit of the Nine High Population Developing Countries held in New Delhi, India was emphatic about the relevance of qualitative teacher production in the success of Universal Basic Education. In line with the aforementioned, Ede (2003) opined that the success of any system of education depends to a large extent on the number of teachers and their quality, their devotion to duty and their effectiveness on the job. In sum, talking also on the role of teachers in the development of Africa, Fafunwa (in Ede, 2003) noted that of all the educational problems that beset the African countries today, none is as persistent or as compelling as the one relating to the training of the competent teacher… indeed the overall problem of preparing the future citizens of Africa cannot be effectively accomplished without aid of competent teachers.
In this regard, the responsibility of government on pre-primary education according to the National Policy on Education (2004) shall be to promote the training of qualified pre-primary schoolteachers in adequate number, contribute to the development of suitable curriculum, among others. However, Maduewesi (2003) observed that teacher preparation which was promised in the National Policy on Education is not being implemented thus nursery school curriculum is not actually being planned by qualified teachers that are adequately trained for that level (early childhood/pre-primary education).
To ensure adequacy of resources in early childhood education, the Federal Ministry of Education prepared guidelines on pre-primary education in 1987, to serve as a yard stick to use in evaluating the standards of early childhood education centres. Among these criteria contained in Maduewesi (2005; 76) include:
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