Lagos, Feb. 20, 2020 Mr Simeon Fowowe, President, Association of Nursery and Primary Education Instructors in Nigeria (ANPEIN), has urged federal and state governments to standardise early childhood and primary education to bring back out of school children in the country.
Fowowe told told Daybreak on Thursday in Lagos that early childhood education helped in the development of a child’s social, emotional, cognitive and physical needs in order to build a solid and broad foundation for lifelong learning.
“Government needs to provide free education for all children, improve the infrastructure, provide materials and employ the right caregivers and teachers into early childhood education system.
“Early childhood education is a term that refers to the period of time from a child’s birth to when they enter kindergarten,” said Fowowe, also Head of Department, Early Childhood Care Education, Adeniran Ogunsanya College of Education (AOCOED), Lagos.
He said that early childhood development in Nigeria was yet to be fully inter-sectoral as each ministry embarked on operations and activities with minimum synergy among different sectors and agencies.
According to him, there are provisions in the education policy for children from birth to three years classified as day care or crèche, and three to five years children fondly referred to as pre-primary education.
“For children between the ages of six to eight in Nigeria, the programme for them is subsumed under the basic education, which implies that there is no special attention given to them apart from basic education of learning to read and write and do sums.
“Again, the provision given by the government for children between three and five years as stipulated in the National Policy on Education (2013) is supposed to be run in all the existing public primary schools in the country.
“This has been a paper work as the programme is not favourably considered in some states in Nigeria.
“While some states poorly give attention to this level of education, others did not even embark on it as they believe the children should be kept at home till they are six year old,” Fowowe said.
He added that the operation of the early childhood education programmes were now largely in the hands of private sector operatives who charge expensively for the services.
“This implies that many children may miss out on the opportunity to partake in this service when families are unable to pay the required fees.
“One in every five of the world’s out-of-school children is in Nigeria. Even though primary education is officially free and compulsory, about 10.5 million of the country’s children aged between five and14 years are not in school,” Fowowe said.
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