Public School Enrollment In Bauchi Crosses Two Million

Bauchi State has recorded over two million student enrollment in public schools across the state.

The development was disclosed by the Bauchi Commissioner for Education, Jamila Dahiru, during a session with the UNICEF Representative in Nigeria, Christian Munduate on Wednesday in the state.

According to Dahiru, students had been enrolled in post-basic and basic schools including Kindergarten.

She added that the state currently has 5,060 schools and 30,752 teachers.

“We have a number of higher institutions, five that are domicile under the Ministry of Education including a university, polytechnic, College of Education and vocational training colleges.

“We also have quite a number of primary schools, junior and senior secondary schools under the ministry.

“These are all in our effort to ensure that we enhance the educational standard of the state,”  she said.

The Commissioner noted that the state government will recruit more teachers and enhance capacity-building programmes to address human resource challenges in the education sector. 

“The teachers who want to stay, we are having issues around that and we are working towards retaining some of them even if it is looking at how we can compensate by paying more to those that are located in local government areas.

“This shortage of teachers, we experience more in the primary than the secondary section including quality teacher – pupils ratio.

“We have a very good number of teachers in the senior secondary schools but we are doing very poor when it comes to primary

“This is because we have more enrollment in the primary than secondary, and that also speaks to the retention, that is the dropout we are talking about,” she said.

Dahiru further stated that the government commenced rehabilitation and infrastructure development projects in schools across the state to provide an enabling environment for teaching and learning while also promoting service delivery.

She added that the government was working closely with traditional institutions, development partners and other relevant agencies to reduce the number of out-of-school children and dropouts in the state.

In her response, Munduate said that the UN agency would cooperate with the Nigerian government to address education and health challenges.