The Anambra State Educational Adversary Council has formally presented its report titled “Solution Agenda: Shaping the Future of Anambra State through Innovative Educational Strategies” to Governor Chukwuma Soludo at the Governor’s Lodge Awka, Anambra State.
The 18 – member Council with Governor Soludo as Chairman, Osita Chidoka, Vice Chairman and Prof. Ngozi Chuma Udeh, Commissioner for education as Secretary, was set up to develop new pathways for delivering quality education and improving learning outcomes for students in the Anambra school system.
Presenting the report to Soludo, the Vice Chairman of the Council, Osita Chidoka, gave a glimpse into the contents of the report.
According to the report, as of the 2022/2023 academic session, Anambra State had 1,098 public and 2,694 private Early Child Care and Primary Schools. The total number of students in the public segment was 255,897 pupils.
In the secondary school segment, 263 public and 769 private secondary schools were recorded with a total student population in 133,741 public secondary schools.
Chidoka said the report focused on elevating the state’s education system based on which key recommendations were made.
The recommendations include:
“A new funding mechanism that includes community participation, an education trust fund, and improved funding for teacher recruitment and training.
“Repurpose the state’s multiple education platforms into a single technology platform capable of providing students, parents, inspectors, and teachers access to Information, training videos, student results, and performance data across all metrics.
“Redesign the school inspection and supervision framework to enable grading and ranking of all schools in Anambra State along pre-set criteria like quality of Infrastructure, performance in state standardized tests, learning outcomes, student’s performance in national examinations, and teacher qualifications, attendance and performance.
“Aligning the state’s aspirations with global standards by joining the Program for International Students Assessments (PISA) as a sub-national government. Anambra State should dream globally. One of the critical lessons from PISA 2022 was that lower-income nations could improve education outcomes by prioritising teacher quality over class sizes”.
Receiving the report, Governor Soludo acknowledged the report’s significance to the state education system and hailed its content as “excellent” and its recommendations as “innovative.”
He promptly directed the operationalization of the report’s key recommendations, which include introducing a new funding model for public schools in line with his vision of free and qualitative education already implemented in all public schools, setting new standards for school inspection and supervision and developing a strategy for grading and ranking schools across the State.
