Executive chairman of the Oyo State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB), Dr Nureni Adeniran, has said the policies of the Governor Seyi Makinde-led administration in the basic education sector, covering primary and junior secondary schools, have reduced infrastructure deficit and improved the quality of education in the state.
Adeniran maintained that the administration had improved the quality of education through the massive training of teaching and non-teaching staff members, the recruitment of thousands of teachers, the construction/renovation of classrooms, and the procurement of school furniture, among other things.
He maintained that improvement in quality resulted in increased school enrolment, with thousands of parents even withdrawing their wards from private schools to enrol them in public schools in the state.
The SUBEB chairman stated this while featuring on the Omituntun 2.0 Inter-Ministerial Briefing held at the Governor’s Office Briefing Room, Secretariat, Agodi, Ibadan, said the governor started the task of repositioning the basic education sector in the state in 2019.
He disclosed that in his first four years of office, the government promptly paid UBEC counterpart funds for 2019, 2020, and 2021, which enabled SUBEB to embark on different physical and human development programmes, uplifting the basic education sector in the state.
He maintained that the board conducted training programmes for 13,859 teaching and non-teaching staff members, constructed 289 blocks of classrooms, 60 model schools, and renovated another 229 classrooms. It also procured 22,962 desks and benches, 1,189 teachers’ furniture, sank 138 boreholes, and 33 motorcycles, 30 desktop computers, and 33 digital tablets, among other efforts.
The SUBEB chairman also lauded the administration’s effort to reduce the number of out-of-school children in the state.
According to him, about 60,000 out-of-school children have been returned to the classrooms.
“There is no gainsaying that the vision of the Governor Seyi Makinde administration on the Basic Education sub-sector to have a very negligible number of out-of-school children in the state, is gaining momentum on a daily basis,” he said.
Speaking on how the government’s efforts have improved education during Omituntun 2.0, Adeniran stated that “the state government has also graciously paid the counterpart funds for 2022 and 2023 to complement the released matching grants from the Federal Government through UBEC for the two years, which amounted to N2,600,237,314.29 only.”
