President Bola Tinubu has approved three frameworks to enhance Nigeria’s educational sector.

The framework would comprehensively overhaul the education sector to improve learning and skill development, increase enrolment and ensure the academic security of the nation’s children.

This was announced in a statement on Thursday.

The approved policies are captured as DOTS, an acronym for Data Repository, Out-of-School Children Education, Teacher Training & Development, and Skill Development & Acquisition.

On data repository, Mr Tinubu approved the conduct of an extensive census to address the current paucity of coordinated, verifiable, and authentic data on the education sector.

This would involve data on all schools from primary to tertiary levels, their conditions and live-in facilities, their proximity to one another, their educational infrastructure, etc.

The statement listed “all teachers in Nigeria, their qualifications, training support received, etc. All pupils and students in primary, secondary, and tertiary institutions, gender, exam grades, etc.”

The information would guide federal and state intervention for teachers’ training, development, and support. It would also provide data on gender ratio (boys and girls), their specific learning needs, and who is in school or who has dropped out based on daily monitoring with year-by-year reporting.

The information dissemination would be done through a dedicated portal/dashboard in the Federal Ministry of Education, offices of state governors, and local government chairpersons to monitor in real-time.

“This new data tracking architecture will enable the government to track students’ progress, thus having a clear data-driven mechanism for interventions, especially concerning out-of-school children, girls, and those with specific learning disabilities, among others,” the statement said.

The government said the Federal Ministry of Education is already implementing its policy on out-of-school children’s education and training through the activities of four of its agencies.

There are already about two million beneficiaries, and the system-wide policy would further enhance the education and training of the nation’s out-of-school children.

Regarding the teachers’ development and support, the statement noted that “under this programme, the Federal Ministry of Education will support and train teachers in digital skills to facilitate the use of technology in classrooms, and this “is expected to bring technology and digitisation to teachers and learners at all levels of education.”

The National Skill Framework Skill enhances skill diversity in the education sector to effectively equip Nigerian students with the requisite skills, knowledge, and values to become functional and productive members of society.

“The framework is designed to provide the appropriate skills for each level of education that will result in the empowering of generations of Nigerians with the required aptitude for the evolving needs of the global economy of the 21st century.

“This framework is expected to address skill gaps, quality of education, and unemployment concerns as students will acquire certain skill sets, in addition to general knowledge,” the statement added.

(NAN)